The Wars of Gods and Men. The Third Book of the Earth Chronicles

ZECHARIA SITCHIN

Author of The 12th Planet

THE WARS

GODS and MEN

The Third Book of The Earth

$22.95

Dear Reader,

The Earth Chronicles series is based on
the premise that mythology is not fanci-
ful but the repository of ancient memo-
ries; that the Bible ought to be read liter-
ally as a historic /scientific document;
and that ancient civilizations— older and
greater than assumed— were the prod-
uct of knowledge brought to Earth by
the Anunnaki, "Those Who from Heaven
to Earth Came.”

The 12th Planet, the first book of
the series, presents ancient evidence for
the existence of an additional planet in
the Solar System: the home planet of
the Anunnaki. In confirmation of this
evidence, recent data from unmanned
spacecraft has led astronomers to ac-
tively search for what is being called
"Planet X.”

The subsequent volume, The Stairway
to Heaven, traces man’s unending search
for immortality to a spaceport in the
Sinai Peninsula and to the Giza pyramids,
which had served as landing beacons for
it— refuting the notion that these pyra-
mids were built by human pharaohs.
Recently, records by an eye witness to a
forgery of an inscription by the pharaoh
Khufu inside the Great Pyramid corrob-
orated the book’s conclusions.

The Wars of Gods and Men, recount-
ing events closer to our times, concludes
that the Sinai spaceport was destroyed

4.000 years ago with nuclear weapons.
Photographs of Earth from space clearly
show evidence of such an explosion.

Such gratifying corroboration of
audacious conclusions has been even
swifter for The Lost Realms. In the rela-
tively short interval between the comple-
tion of the manuscript and its publica-
tion, archaeologists, linguists, and other
scientists have offered a "coastal theory"
in lieu of the "frozen trekking” one to
account for man’s arrival in the
Americas— in ships, as this volume has
concluded; have "suddenly discovered

2.000 years of missing civilization,” in the
words of a Yale University scholar—

Praise for The Earth Chronicles series

“Exciting . . . credible . . . most provocative and compelling.”

—Library Journal

"A dazzling performance . . . Sitchin is a zealous investigator.”

—Kirkus Reviews

"Several factors make Sitchin’s well-referenced works out-
standingly different from all others that present this central
theme. For one, his linguistic skills, which include not only
several modern languages that make it possible for him to
consult other scholars’ works in their original tongues, but
the ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Hebrew, and other languages
of antiquity as well.

"The devotion of thirty years to academic search and per-
sonal investigation before publishing resulted in unusual
thoroughness, perspective, and modifications where need
arose. The author’s pursuit of the earliest available texts and
artifacts also made possible the wealth of photos and line
drawings made for his books from tablets, monuments, murals,
pottery, seals, etc. Used generously throughout, they provide
vital visual evidence. . . . While the author does not pretend
to solve all the puzzles that have kept intensive researchers
baffled for well over one hundred years, he has provided
some new clues.”

—Rosemary Decker, historian and researcher

Other books by Zecharia Sitchin

THE EARTH CHRONICLES

Book I: The 12th Planet
Book II: The Stairway to Heaven
Book IV: The Lost Realms
Book V: When Time Began

Genesis Revisited:

Is Modem Science Catching Up with Ancient Knowledge

All of these titles are available in
hardcover editions by Bear & Company.

ZECHARIA SITCHIN

THE WARS

GODS AMD MEN

The Third
Book of

The Earth Chronicles

BEAR COMPANY

PUBLISHING

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sitchin, Zecharia.

The wars of gods and men / Zecharia Sitchin.

p. cm. — (The third book of the Earth chronicles)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-939680-90-4

1. Civilization, Ancient— Extraterrestrial influences.

2. Interplanetary voyages. 3. Middle East— History— lb 622.

L Title. II. Series: Sitchin, Zecharia. Earth chronicles : 3.
CB156.S59 1992

001. 9’4— dc20 91-47916

CIP

© 1985 by Zecharia Sitchin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any
means or in any form whatsoever without written permission from
the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in literary articles
or reviews.

The Bear & Company edition of The Wars of Gods and Men is the
first hardcover edition of this book. It was previously published in
paperback by Avon Books in 1985.

Bear & Company, Inc.

Santa Fe, NM 87504-2860

Jacket design & illustration: Angela Werneke © 1992
Back cover photo: Courtesy of NASA

35798642

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword vi

1 The Wars of Man 1

2 The Contending of Horus and Seth 25

3 The Missiles of Zeus and Indra 49

4 The Earth Chronicles 70

5 The Wars of the Olden Gods 91

6 Mankind Emerges 109

7 When Earth Was Divided 129

8 The Pyramid Wars 153

9 Peace on Earth 173

10 The Prisoner in the Pyramid 202

11 “A Queen Am I!” 229

12 Prelude to Disaster 251

13 Abraham: The Fateful Years 281

14 The Nuclear Holocaust 310

Epilogue 343

The Earth Chronicles: Time Chart 345

Sources 351

Index 3$d>

FOREWORD

Long before man warred with man, the gods battled among them-
selves. Indeed, it was as the Wars of the Gods that the Wars of Man
began.

And the Wars of the Gods, for control of this Earth, had begun
on their own planet.

It was thus that mankind’s first civilization succumbed to a nu-
clear holocaust.

This is fact, not fiction; it has all been written down long ago— in
the Earth Chronicles.

vi

1

THE WARS OF MAN

In the spring of 1947, a shepherd boy searching for a lost sheep in
the barren cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea, discovered a cave that
contained Hebrew scrolls hidden inside earthenware jars. Those
and other scrolls found in the area in subsequent years— collec-
tively spoken of as the Dead Sea Scrolls— had lain undisturbed for
nearly two thousand years, carefully wrapped and hidden away
during the turbulent years when Judea challenged the might of the
Roman empire.

Was this part of the official library of Jerusalem, carted away to
safety before the city and its temple fell in a.d. 70, or— as most
scholars assume — a library of the Essenes, a sect of hermits with
messianic preoccupations? The opinions are divided, tor the li-
brary contained both traditional biblical texts as well as writings
dealing with the sect’s customs, organization, and beliefs.

One of the longest and most complete scrolls, and perhaps the
most dramatic, deals with a future war, a kind of Final War. Titled
by scholars The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Dark-
ness, it envisages spreading warfare ^local battles that will first in-
volve Judea’s immediate neighbors, which shall increase in feroc-
ity and scope until the whole ancient world would be engulfed:
“The first engagement of the Sons of Light against the Sons of
Darkness, that is against the army of Belial, shall be an attack upon
the troops of Edom, Moab, the Ammonites and the Philistine area;
then upon that of the Kittians of Assyria; and upon those violators
of the Covenant who give them aid. . . .” And after those battles,
“they shall advance upon the Kittians of Egypt” and “in due time
. . . against the kings of the north.”

In this War of Men, the scroll prophesied, the God of Israel shall
take an active role:

On the day the Kittians fall, there shall be mighty combat and
carnage, in the presence of the God of Israel;

For that is the day which He appointed of old for the final bat-
tle against the Sons of Darkness.

1

2

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The Prophet Ezekiel had already prophesied the Last Battle, “in
the latter days,” involving Gog and Magog, in which the Lord
himself shall “smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause
thine arrows to fall out of thine right hand.” But the Dead Sea
scroll went further, foreseeing the actual participation of many
gods in the battles, engaged in combat side by side with mortal
men:

On that day, the Company of the Divine and the Congregation
of the Mortals shall engage side by side in combat and carnage.

The Sons of Light shall battle against the Sons of Darkness
with a show of godlike might, amid uproarious tumult, amid the
war cries of gods and men.

Though Crusaders, Saracens, and countless others in historical
times have gone to war “in the name of God,” the belief that in a
war to come the Lord himself shall be actually present on the bat-
tlefield, and that gods and men would fight side by side, sounds as
fantasy, to be treated allegorically at best. Yet it is not as extraordi-
nary a notion as it may appear to be, for in earlier times, it was in-
deed believed that the Wars of Men were not only decreed by the
gods but were also fought with the gods’ active participation.

One of the most romanticized wars, when “love had launched a
thousand ships,” was the War of Troy, between the Achaean
Greeks and the Trojans. It was, know we not, launched by the
Greeks to force the Trojans to return the beautiful Helen to her law-
ful spouse. Yet an epic Greek tale, the Kypria, represented the war
as a premeditated scheme by the great god Zeus:

There was a time when thousands upon thousands of men en-
cumbered the broad bosom of the Earth. And having pity on
them, Zeus in his great wisdom resolved to lighten Earth’s bur-
den.

So he caused the strife at Ilion (Troy) to that end; that through
death he might make a void in the race of men.

Homer, the Greek storyteller who related the war’s events in the
Iliad, blamed the whim of the gods for instigating the conflict and
for turning and twisting it to its ultimate major proportions. Acting
directly and indirectly, sometimes seen and sometimes unseen, the
various gods nudged the principal actors of this human drama to
their fates. And behind it all was Jove (Jupiter/Zeus): “While the

The Wars of Man 3

other gods and the armed warriors on the plain slept soundly, Jove
was wakeful, for he was thinking how to do honor to Achilles and
destroy much people at the ships of the Achaeans.”

Even before the battle was joined, the god Apollo began the hos-
tilities: “He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as
dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in
the midst of them [the Achaeans] . . . For nine whole days he shot
his arrows among the people. . . . And all day long, the pyres of
the dead were burning.” When the contending sides agreed to
postpone hostilities so that their leaders might decide the issue in
hand-to-hand combat, the unhappy gods instructed the goddess
Minerva: “Go at once into the Trojan and Achaean hosts, and con-
trive that the Trojans shall be the first to break their oaths and set
upon the Achaeans.” Eager for the mission, Minerva “shot
through the sky as some brilliant meteor ... a fiery train of light
followed in her wake.” Later on, lest the raging warfare cease for
the night, Minerva turned night into day by lighting up the battle-
field: She “lifted the thick veil of darkness from their eyes, and
much light fell upon them, both on the side of the ships and on
where the fight was raging; and the Achaeans could see Hector and
all his men.”

As the battles raged on and on, sometimes pitching one hero
against another, the gods, too, kept a watchful eye over individual
warriors, swooping down to snatch away a beleaguered hero or to
steady a driverless chariot. But when the gods and goddesses, find-
ing themselves on opposing sides, began to hurt each other, Zeus
called a halt, ordering them to keep out of the mortals’ fighting.

The respite did not last long, for many of the leading combatants
were sons of gods or goddesses (by human mates). Especially an-
gered was Mars, when his son Ascalaphus was pierced to death by
one of the Achaeans. “Do not blame me, ye gods that dwell in
heaven, if I go to the ships of the Achaeans and avenge the death of
my son,” Mars announced to the other Immortals, “even if in the
end I shall be struck by Jove’s lightning and shall lie in blood and
dust among the corpses.”

“So long as the gods held themselves aloof from the mortal war-
riors,” wrote Homer, “the Achaeans were triumphant, for Achil-
les who has long refused to fight was now with them.” But in view
of the mounting anger among the gods, and the help the Achaeans
were now getting from the demigod Achilles, Jove changed his
mind:

M*|f

l

4

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

“For my own part, I shall stay here,

seated on Mount Olympus, and look on in peace.

But you others, do go among the Trojans and Achaeans,
and help either side as you might be disposed."

Thus spake Jove, and gave the word for war;

Whereon the gods took their several sides
and went into battle.

The Battle of Troy, indeed Troy itself, were long thought of as
just part of the fascinating but incredible Greek legends, which
scholars have tolerantly called mythology. Troy and the events
pertaining to it were still considered to be purely mythological
when Charles McLaren suggested, back in 1822, that a certain
mound in eastern Turkey, called Hissarlik, was the site of the Ho-
meric Troy. It was only when a businessman named Heinrich
Schliemann, risking his own money, came up with spectacular dis-
coveries as he dug up the mound in 1870, that scholars began to
acknowledge the existence of Troy. It is now accepted that the Bat-
tle of Troy had actually taken place in the thirteenth century b.c. It
was then, according to the Greek sources, that gods and men had
fought side by side; in such beliefs the Greeks were not alone.

In those days, though the tip of Asia Minor facing Europe and
the Aegean Sea were dotted with what were essentially Greek set-
tlements, Asia Minor proper was dominated by the Hittites.
Known at first to modem scholars only from biblical references,
then from Egyptian inscriptions, the Hittites and their kingdom—
Hatti— also came to life as archaeologists began to uncover their
ancient cities.

The decipherment of the Hittite script and their Indo-European
language made it possible to trace their origins to the second
millennium b.c., when Aryan tribes began to migrate from the
Caucasus area — some southeast to India, others southwest to Asia
Minor. The Hittite kingdom flourished circa 1750 b.c. and began
to decline five hundred years later. It was then that the Hittites
were harassed by incursions from across the Aegean Sea. The Hit-
tites spoke of the invaders as the people of Achiyawa; many schol-
ars believe that they were the very same people whom Homer
called Achioi— the Achaeans, whose attack upon the western tip of
Asia Minor he immortalized in the Iliad.

For centuries prior to the war of Troy, the Hittites expanded
their kingdom to imperial proportions, claiming to have done so
upon the orders of their supreme god TESHUB (“The Stormer").

The Wars of Man

5

His olden title was “Storm God Whose Strength Makes Dead,”
and Hittite kings sometimes claimed that the god had actually taken
a hand in the battle: “The mighty Stormgod, my Lord,” [wrote the
king Murshilis], “showed his divine power and shot a thunder-
bolt" at the enemy, helping to defeat it. Also aiding the Hittites in
battle was the goddess ISHTAR, whose epithet was “Lady of the
battlefield.” It was to her “Divine Power” that many a victory
was attributed, as she “came down [from the skies] to smite the
hostile countries.”

Hittite influence, as many references in the Old Testament indi-
cate, extended south into Canaan; but they were there as settlers,
not as conquerors. While they treated Canaan as a neutral zone,
laying to it no claim, this was not the attitude of the Egyptians. Re-
peatedly the Pharaohs sought to extend their rule northward to Ca-
naan and the Cedar Land (Lebanon); they succeeded in doing so,
circa 1470 b.c., when they defeated a coalition of Canaanite kings
at Megiddo.

The Old Testament, and inscriptions left by the Hittites' foes,
pictured the Hittites as expert warriors who perfected the use of the
chariot in the ancient Near East. But the Hittites’ own inscriptions
suggest that they went to war only when the gods gave the word,
that the enemy was offered a chance to surrender peacefully before
hostilities began, and that once a war was won, the Hittites were
satisfied to receive tribute and take captives; the cities were not
sacked; the populace was not massacred.

But Thothmes III, the Pharaoh who was victorious at the battle
of Megiddo, was proud to say in his inscriptions: “Now his maj-
esty went north, plundering towns and laying encampments
waste.” Of a vanquished king the Pharaoh wrote: “I desolated his
towns, set fire to his encampments, made mounds of them; their
resettlement can never take place. All the people I captured. I made
prisoners; their countless cattle I carried off, and their goods as
well. I took away every resource of life; I cut down their grain and
felled all their groves and all their pleasant trees. I totally destroyed
it." It was all done, the Pharaoh wrote, on the say-so of AMON-
RA, his god.

The vicious nature of Egyptian warfare and the pitiless destruc-
tiveness they inflicted upon a vanquished foe were subjects of
boastful inscriptions. The Pharaoh Pepi I, forexantpie. commemo-
rated his victory over the Asiatic “sand-dwellers” in a poem which
hailed the army which “hacked up the land of the sand-dwellers
. . . cut down its fig trees and vines . . . cast fire into all its dwell-

Fig. 1

Adhering to this wanton tradition, the Pharaoh Pi-Ankhy, who
sent troops from Upper Egypt to subdue the rebellious Lower
Egypt, was enraged by his generals’ suggestion that adversaries
who survived the battle be spared. Vowing “destruction forever,”
the Pharaoh announced that he would come to the captured city “to
min that which had remained.” For this, he stated, “My father
Amon praises me.”

The god Amon, to whose battle orders the Egyptians attributed
their viciousness, found his match in the God of Israel. In the
words of the Prophet Jeremiah, “Thus sayeth the Lord of Hosts,
the God of Israel: ‘I will punish Amon, god of Thebes, and those
who trust in him, and shall bring retribution upon Egypt and its
gods, its Pharaoh and its kings.' ” This, we leam from the Bible,
was an ongoing confrontation; nearly a thousand years earlier, in
the days of the Exodus, Yahweh, the God of Israel, smote Egypt
with a series of afflictions intended not only to soften the heart of
its ruler but also as “judgments against all the gods of Egypt.”

The miraculous departure of the Israelites out of bondage in
Egypt to the Promised Land was attributed in the biblical tale of
Exodus to the direct intervention of Yahweh in those momentous
events:

The Wars of Man

7

And they journeyed from Succoth

and encamped at Etham, at the edge of the desert.

And Yahweh went forth before them,

by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way,

and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.

There then ensued a sea battle of which the Pharaoh preferred to
leave no inscriptions; we know of it from the Book of Exodus:

And the heart of the Pharaoh and his servants
was changed with respect to the people. . . .

And the Egyptians pursued after them,

and they overtook them encamped by the sea. . . .

And Yahweh drove back the sea with a strong east wind
all that night, and dried up the waters;
and the waters separated.

And the Children of Israel went into the midst of the sea
upon dry ground. . . .

At daybreak, when the Egyptians realized what had happened,
the Pharaoh ordered his chariots after the Israelites. But:

It came to pass at the time of the morning watch
that Yahweh surveyed the camp of the Egyptians
from the pillar of fire and cloud; •

And he stunned the Egyptian camp
and loosened the wheels of their chariots,
making their driving difficult.

And the Egyptians said:

“Let us flee from the Israelites,

for Yahweh fighteth for them against Egypt.”

But the Egyptian ruler pursuing the Israelites ordered his chariots
to press on with the attack. The result was calamitous for the Egyptians:

And the waters returned,

and covered the chariots and the horsemen

and all the host of the Pharaoh that was following them;

not one of them remained. . . .

And Israel beheld the great power

which Yahweh had shown upon the Egyptians.

8

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The biblical language is almost identical to the words of a later
Pharaoh, Ramses II, used by him to describe the miraculous ap-
pearance of Amon-Ra at his side during a decisive battle fought
with the Hittites in 128$ b.c.

Taking place at the fortress of Kadesh in Lebanon, the battle pit-
ted four divisions of the Pharaoh Ramses II against forces mobi-
lized by the Hittite king Muwatallis from all parts of his empire. It
ended with an Egyptian retreat, cutting short Egypt's northward
thrust toward Syria and Mesopotamia. It also drained Hittite re-
sources and left them weakened and exposed.

The Hittite victory might have been more decisive, for they had
almost captured the Pharaoh himself. Only partial Hittite inscrip-
tions dealing with the battle have been found; but Ramses, on his
return to Egypt, saw fit to describe in detail the miracle of his es-
cape.

His inscriptions on temple walls, accompanied by detailed illus-
trations (Fig. 2), relate how the Egyptian armies had reached Ka-
desh and encamped south of it, readying themselves for the battle.
Surprisingly the Hittite enemy did not step forward to do battle.
Ramses then ordered two of his divisions to advance toward the
fortress. It was then that the Hittite chariots appeared as if from no-
where, attacking the advancing divisions from behind and causing
havoc in the encampments of the two others.

As the Egyptian troops began to flee in panic, Ramses suddenly
realized that “His Majesty was all alone with his bodyguard”; and
“when the king looked behind him, he saw that he was blocked off
by 2,500 chariots”— -not his own but of the Hittites. Abandoned by

The Wars of Man

9

his officers, charioteers, and infantry, Ramses turned to his god,
reminding him that he finds himself in this predicament only be-
cause he had followed the god’s orders:

And His Majesty said:

“What now, my Father Amon?

Has a father forgotten his son?

Have 1 ever done anything without you?

Whatever I did or did not do,

was it not in accordance with your commands?”

Reminding the Egyptian god that the enemy was beholden to
other gods, Ramses went on to ask: “What are these Asiatics to
you, O Amon? These wretches who know nothing of thee, O
God?”

As Ramses went on pleading with his god Amon to save him, for
the god’s powers were greater than those of “millions of foot sol-
diers, of hundreds of thousands of chariot-soldiers,” a miracle
happened: the god showed up on the battlefield!

Amon heard when I called him.

He held out his hand to me, and I rejoiced.

He stood behind me and called out:

“Forward! Forward!

Ramses, beloved of Amon, I am with thee!”

Following the command of his god, Ramses tore into the enemy
troops. Under the influence of the god the Hittites were inexplica-
bly enfeebled: “their hands dropped to their sides, they were un-
able to shoot their arrows nor raise their spears.” And they called
unto one another: “This is no mortal who is among us: this is a
mighty god; his deeds are not the deeds of a man; a god is in his
limbs.” Thus unopposed, slaying the enemy left and right, Ramses
managed to escape.

After the death of Muwatallis, Egypt and the Hittite kingdom
signed a peace treaty, and the reigning Pharaoh took a Hittite prin-
cess to be his principal wife. The peace was needed because not
only the Hittites but also the Egyptians were increasingly coming
under attack by “Peoples of the Sea” — invaders from Crete and
other Greek islands. They gained a foothold on the Mediterranean
coast of Canaan to become the biblical Philistines; but their attacks
on Egypt proper were beaten back by the Pharaoh Ramses III, who

10

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

commemorated the battle scenes on temple walls (Fig. 3). He at-
tributed his victories to his strict adherence to “the plans of the All-
Lord, my august divine father, the Lord of the Gods.” It was to his
god Amon-Ra, Ramses wrote, that the credit for the victories was
due: for it was “Amon-Ra who was after them, destroying them.”

Fig. 3

The bloody trail of man’s war against his fellow men in behalf of
the gods now takes us back to Mesopotamia— the Land Between
the Rivers (Euphrates and Tigris) — the biblical Land of Shin’ar.
There, as is related in Genesis 1 1 , the first-ever cities arose, with
buildings made with bricks and towers that scraped the skies. It
was there that recorded history began; it was there that prehistory
began with the settlements of the Olden Gods.

It is a tale of long ago, which we will soon unfold. But right now
let us return to a thousand years before the dramatic times of Ram-
ses II in Egypt. Then, in faraway Mesopotamia, kingship was
taken over by an ambitious young man. He was called Sharru-
Kin — “Righteous Ruler”; our textbooks call him Sargon the First.
He built a new capital city, calling it Agade, and established the
kingdom of Akkad. The Akkadian language, written in a wedge-
like (cuneiform) script, was the mother tongue of all the Semitic
languages, of which Hebrew and Arabic are still in use.

Reigning for the better part of the twenty-fourth century b.c.,
Sargon attributed his long reign (fifty-four years) to the special sta-
tus granted him by the Great Gods, who made him “Overseer of
Ishtar, Anointed Priest of ANU, Great Righteous Shepherd of
ENLIL.” It was Enlil, Sargon wrote, “who did not let anybody
oppose Sargon” and who gave Sargon “the region from the Upper
Sea to the Lower Sea” (from the Mediterranean to the Persian

The Wars of Man

11

Gulf). It was therefore to “the gate of the House of Enlil” that Sar-
gon brought the captive kings, ropes tied to the dog collars around
their necks.

In one of his campaigns across the Zagros mountains, Sargon
experienced the same godly feat that the combatants at Troy had
witnessed. As he “was moving into the land of Warahshi . . .
when he pressed forward in the darkness . . . Ishtar made a light to
shine for him.” Thus was Sargon able to “penetrate the gloom” of
darkness as he led his troops through the mountain passes of to-
day’s Luristan.

The Akkadian dynasty begun by Sargon reached its peak under
his grandson Naram-Sin (“Whom the god Sin loves”). His con-
quests, Naram-Sin wrote on his monuments, were possible be-
cause his god had armed him with a unique weapon, the “Weapon
of the God,” and because the other gods granted him their explicit
consent— or even invited him— to enter their regions.

Naram-Sin’s principal thrust was to the northwest, and his con-
quests included the city-state of Ebla, whose recently discovered
archive of clay tablets has caused great scientific interest: “Al-
though since the time of the separation of mankind none of the
kings has ever destroyed Arman and Ibla, the god Nergal did open
up the path for the mighty Naram-Sin and gave him Arman and
Ibla. He also gave him as a present Amanus, the Cedar Mountain,
to the Upper Sea.”

Just as Naram-Sin could attribute his successful campaigns to his
heeding the commands of his gods, so was his downfall attributed
to his going to war against the word of the gods. Scholars have put
together from fragments of several versions a text that has been ti-
tled The Legend of Naram-Sin. Speaking in the first person, Naram-
Sin explains in this tale of woe that his troubles began when the
goddess Ishtar “changed her plan” and the gods gave their blessing to
“seven kings, brothers, glorious and noble; their troops numbered
360,000.” Coming from what is now Iran, they invaded the mountain
lands of Gutium and Elam to the east of Mesopotamia and were threat-
ening Akkad itself. Naram-Sin asked the gods what to do and was told
to put aside his weapons and, instead of going to battle, to go sleep
with his wife (but, for some deep reason, avoid making love):

The gods reply to him:

“O Naram-Sin, this is our word:

This army against you . . .

Bind your weapons, in a comer place them!

12

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Hold back your boldness, stay at home!

Together with your wife, in bed go sleep,

but with her you must not . . .

Out of your land, unto the enemy, you must not go.”

But Naram-Sin, announcing that he would rely on his own weap-
ons, decided to attack the enemy in spite of the gods’ advice.
“When the first year arrived, I sent out 120,000 troops, but none of
them returned alive, Naram-Sin confessed in his inscription.
More troops were annihilated in the second and third years, and
Akkad was succumbing to death and hunger. On the fourth anni-
versary of the unauthorized war, Naram-Sin appealed to the great
god Ea to overrule Ishtar and put his case before the other gods.
They advised him to desist from further fighting, promising that
“in days to come, Enlil will summon perdition upon the Sons of
Evil,” and Akkad would have respite.

The promised era of peace lasted about three centuries, during
which the olden part of Mesopotamia, Sumer, reemerged as the
center of kingship, and the oldest urban centers of the ancient world

Ur, Nippur, Lagash, Isin, Larsa — flourished again. Sumer, un-
der the kings of Ur, was the center of an empire that encompassed
the whole of the ancient Near East. But toward the end of the third
millennium b.c., the land became the arena for contending loyalties
and opposing armies; and then that great civilization— man's first
known civilization— succumbed to a major catastrophe of unprece-
dented proportions.

It was a fateful event which, we believe, was echoed in biblical
tales. It was an event whose memory lingered on for a long time,
commemorated and bewailed in numerous lamentation poems;
they gave a very graphic description of the havoc and desolation
that befell that great heartland of ancient civilization. It was, those
Mesopotamian texts stated, a catastrophe that befell Sumer as a re-
sult of a decision of the great gods sitting in council.

It took southern Mesopotamia almost a century to be resettled
and another century to fully recover from the divine annihilation.
By then, the center of Mesopotamian power had shifted northward,
to Babylon. There, a new empire was to rise, proclaiming an ambi-
tious god, MARDUK, as its supreme deity.

Circa 1800 b.c., Hammurabi, the king renowned for his law
code, ascended the throne in Babylon and began to extend its
boundaries. According to his inscriptions the gods not only told

The Wars of Man 13

him if and when to launch his military campaigns but were literally
leading his armies:

Through the power of the great gods
the king, beloved of the god Marduk,
reestablished the foundations of Sumer and Akkad.

Upon the command of Anu, and

with Enlil advancing in front of his army,

with the mighty powers which the great gods gave him,

he was no match for the army of Emutbal

and its king Rim-Sin. . . .

To defeat more enemies the god Marduk granted Hammurabi a
“powerful weapon” ealled “Great Power of Marduk”:

With the Powerful Weapon

with which Marduk proclaimed his triumphs,

the hero [Hammurabi] overthrew in battle

the armies of Eshnuna, Subartu and Gutium. . . .

With the “Great Power of Marduk”

he overthrew the armies of Sutium, Turukku, Kamu. . . .
With the Mighty Power which Anu and Enlil had given him
he defeated all his enemies
as far as the country of Subartu.

But before long Babylon had to share its might with a new rival
to its north — Assyria, where not Marduk but the bearded god
ASHUR (“The All-Seeing") was proclaimed supreme. While
Babylon tangled with the lands to its south and east, the Assyrians
extended their rule northward and westward, as far as “the country
of Lebanon, on the shores of the Great Sea.” These were lands in
the domains of the gods NINURTA and ADAD, and the Assyrian
kings carefully noted that they launched their campaigns on the ex-
plicit commands of these great gods. Thus, Tiglat-Pileser I com-
memorated his wars, in the twelfth century b.c., in the following
words:

Tiglat-Pileser, the legitimate king, king of the world, king of
Assyria, king of all the four regions of the earth;

The courageous hero who is guided by the trust-inspiring
commands given by Ashur and Ninurta, the great gods, his
lords, thus overthrowing his enemies. . . .

14

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

At the command of my lord Ashur, my hand conquered from be-
yond the lower Zab River to the Upper Sea which is in the west.
Three times I did march against the Nairi countries. ... I made
bow to my feet 30 kings of the Nairi countries. I took hostages from
them, I received as their tribute horses broken to the yoke.

Upon the command of Anu and Adad, the great gods, my
lords, I went to the Lebanon mountains; I cut cedar beams for
the temples of Anu and Adad.

In assuming the title “king of the world, king of the four regions
of the Earth,” the Assyrian kings directly challenged Babylon, for
Babylon encompassed the ancient region of Sumer and Akkad. To
legitimize their claim the Assyrian kings had to take control of
those olden cities where the Great Gods had their homes in olden
times; but the way to these sites was blocked by Babylon. The feat
was achieved in the ninth century b.c. by Shalmaneser III; he said
thus in his inscriptions:

I marched against Akkad to avenge ... and inflicted de-
feat. ... I entered Kutha, Babylon and Borsippa.

I offered sacrifices to the gods of the sacred cities of Akkad. I
went further downstream to Chaldea, and received tribute from
all the kings of Chaldea. . . .

At that time, Ashur, the great lord . . . gave me scepter, staff
... all that was necessary to rule the people.

I was acting only upon the trustworthy commands given by
Ashur, the great lord, my lord who loves me.

Describing his various military campaigns, Shalmaneser asserted
that his victories were achieved with weapons provided by two gods:
“I fought with the Mighty Force which Ashur, my lord, had given
me; and with the strong weapons which Nergal, my leader, had pre-
sented tome.” The weapon of Ashur was described as having a “terri-
fying brilliance.” In a war with Adini the enemy fled on seeing “the
terrifying Brilliance of Ashur; it overwhelmed them.”

When Babylon, after several acts of defiance, was sacked by the
Assyrian king Sennacherib (in 689 b.c.), its demise was made possi-
ble because its own god, Marduk, became angry with its king and
people, and decreed that “seventy years shall be the measure of its
desolation”— exactly as the God of Israel had later decreed for Jerusa-
lem. With the subjugation of the whole of Mesopotamia, Sennacherib
was able to assume the cherished title “King of Sumer and Akkad.”

The Wars of Man 15

In his inscriptions, Sennacherib also described his military cam-
paigns along the Mediterranean coast, leading to battles with the
Egyptians at the gateway to the Sinai peninsula. His list of con-
quered cities reads like a chapter in the Old Testament— Sidon,
Tyre, Byblos, Akko, Ashdod, Ashkalon— “strong cities” that
Sennacherib “overwhelmed” with the aid of “the awe-inspiring
Brilliance, the weapon of Ashur, my lord.” Reliefs that illustrate
his campaigns (as the one depicting the siege of Lachish, Fig. 4)
show the attackers using rocketlike missiles against their enemy. In

16

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

the conquered cities Sennacherib “killed their officials and patri-
cians . . . and hung their bodies on poles surrounding the city; the
common citizens I considered prisoners of war.”

An artifact known as the Prism of Sennacherib preserved an his-
torical inscription in which he made mention of the subjugation of
Judea and his attack on Jerusalem. The quarrel Sennacherib had
with its king, Hezekiah, was the fact that he held captive Padi, the
king of the Philistine city of Ekron, “who was loyal to his solemn
oath to his god Ashur. ”

“As to Hezekiah, the Judean,” Sennacherib wrote, “who did
not submit to my yoke, I laid siege to forty-six of his strong cities,
walled forts, and to the countless small villages in their vicin-
ity. . . . Hezekiah himself I made captive in Jerusalem, his royal
residence; like a bird in a cage I surrounded him with earth-
works. . . . His towns which I had plundered I cut off from his
land and gave them over to Mitinti, king of Ashdod; Padi, king of
Ekron; and Sillibel, king of Gaza. Thus I reduced his country.”

The siege of Jerusalem offers several interesting aspects. It had
no direct cause but only an indirect one: the forced holding there
of the loyal king of Ekron. The “awe-inspiring Brilliance, the
weapon of Ashur,” which was employed to “overwhelm the
strong cities” of Phoenicia and Philistia, was not used against Je-
rusalem. And the customary inscriptional ending — “I fought with
them and inflicted defeat upon them” — is missing in the case of Je-
rusalem; Sennacherib merely reduced the size of Judea by giving
its outlying areas to neighboring kings.

Moreover, the usual claim that a land ora city was attacked upon
the “trustworthy orders” of the god Ashur was also absent in the
case of Jerusalem; one wonders whether all this meant that the at-
tack on the city was an unauthorized attack— a whim of Sennach-
erib himself but not the wish of his god?

This intriguing possibility becomes a convincing probability as
we read the other side of the story— for such an other side does
exist in the Old Testament.

While Sennacherib glossed over his failure to capture Jerusalem,
the tale in II Kings, chapters 18 and 19, offers the full story. We
learn from the biblical report that “in the fourteenth year of king
Hezekiah Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, came upon all the
walled cities of Judea and captured them.” He then sent two of his
generals with a large army to Jerusalem, the capital. But instead of
storming the city, the Assyrian general Rab-Shakeh began a verbal
exchange with the city’s leaders— an exchange he insisted on con-

The Wars of Man 17

ducting in Hebrew so that the whole populace might understand
him.

What did he have to say that the populace ought to have known?
As the biblical text makes clear, the verbal exchanges concerned
the question of whether the Assyrian invasion of Judea was autho-
rized by the Lord Yahweh!

“And Rab-Shakeh said unto them: Speak ye now to Hezekiah:
Thus sayeth the great king, the king of Assyria: What confidence is
it wherein thou trusteth?”

If ye say unto me:

“We trust in Yahweh, our God” . . .

Now then.

Am I come against this place to destroy it
without Yahweh?

Yahweh did say unto me:

“Go up against this land, and destroy it!"

The more the ministers of king Hezekiah, standing upon the
city's walls, pleaded with Rab-Shakeh to cease saying these untrue
things in Hebrew and to deliver his message in the then language of
diplomacy, Aramaic, the more did Rab-Shakeh approach the walls
to shout his words in Hebrew for all to hear. Soon he began to use
foul language against Hezekiah’s emissaries; then he started to de-
grade the king himself. Carried away by his own oratory, Rab-
Shakeh abandoned his claim to have had Yahweh's permission to
attack Jerusalem and went on to belittle the God himself.

When Hezekiah was told of the blasphemy, “he rent his clothes,
and covered himself with sackcloth and went into the House of
Yahweh. . . . And he sent word to the Prophet Isaiah, saying:
‘This is a day of trouble, of rebuke, of blasphemy. . . . May Yah-
weh thy Lord hear all the words of Rab-Shakeh, whom his master
the king of Assyria hath sent to scorn the Living God.' And the
word of the Lord Yahweh came back through his Prophet Isaiah:
‘Concerning the king of Assyria ... the way that he came, he
shall return; and unto this city he shall not come in . . . for I shall
defend this city to save it.'

And it came to pass that night,
that the angel of Yahweh went forth
and smote in the camp of the Assyrians
a hundred and eighty-five thousand;

18

f

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

and at sunrise, lo and behold,
they were all dead corpses.

So Sennacherib, the king of Assyria,

departed, and journeyed back and dwelt in Nineveh.

According to the Old Testament, after Sennacherib had returned
to Nineveh, it came to pass, as he was worshiping in the temple
of his god Nisroch, that Adrammelech and Sharezzer his sons
smote him with a sword; and they escaped unto the land of Ararat.
And Esarhaddon, his son, reigned in his stead.” Assyrian records
confirm the biblical statement: Sennacherib was indeed so assas-
sinated, and his younger son Esarhaddon did ascend the throne af-
ter him.

An inscription of Esarhaddon known as Prism B describes the
circumstances more fully. On the command of the great gods,
Sennacherib had publicly proclaimed his younger son as successor.
“He called together the people of Assyria, young and old, and he
made my brothers, the male offspring of my father, take a solemn
oath in the presence of the gods of Assyria ... in order to secure
my succession.” The brothers then broke their oath, killing
Sennacherib and seeking to kill Esarhaddon. But the gods snatched
him away and made me stay in a hiding place . . . preserving me
for kingship.”

After a period of turmoil Esarhaddon received “a trustworthy
command from the gods; ‘Go, do not delay! We will march with
you!’ ”

The deity who was delegated to accompany Esarhaddon was
Ishtar. As his brothers’ forces came out of Nineveh to beat off his
attack on the capital, “Ishtar, the Lady of Battle, who wished me
to be her high priest, stood at my side. She broke their bows, scat-
tered their orderly battle array. ’ Once the Ninevite troops were
disorganized, Ishtar addressed them in behalf of Esarhaddon.

Upon her lofty command, they went over in masses to me and
rallied behind me, Esarhaddon wrote, “and recognized me as
their king.”

Both Esarhaddon and his son and successor Ashurbanipal at-
tempted to advance against Egypt, and both employed Weapons
of Brilliance in the battles. “The terror-inspiring Brilliance of
Ashur,” Ashurbanipal wrote, “blinded the Pharaoh so that he be-
came a madman. ”

Other inscriptions of Ashurbanipal suggest that this weapon,
which emitted an intense, blinding brightness, was worn by the

The Wars of Man

19

gods as part of their headgear. In one instance an enemy “was
blinded by the brightness from the god-head.” In another, “Ishtar,
who dwells in Arbela, clad in Divine Fire and sporting the Radiant
Headwear, rained flames upon Arabia.”

The Old Testament, too, refers to such a Weapon of Brilliance
that could blind. When the Angels (literally, emissaries) of the
Lord came to Sodom prior to its destruction, the populace at-
tempted to break down the door of the house in which they were
resting. So the Angels “smote the people at the entrance of the
house with blindness . . . and they were unable to find the door-
way . ’ ’

As Assyria rose to supremacy, even extending its rule over
Lower Egypt, its kings, in the words of the Lord through his
prophet Isaiah, forgot that they were only an instrument of the
Lord: “Ho Assyria, the whip of mine anger! My wrath is the rod in
their hands; against impious nations I send them; upon people who
have crossed me I charge them.” But the Assyrian kings went be-
yond mere punishment; “rather, it is in its heart to annihilate and
wipe out nations not few.” This went beyond the intention of the
God; therefore, the Lord Yahweh announced, “I shall hold to ac-
count the king of Assyria, on account of the fruits of the growing
haughtiness of his heart.”

The biblical prophecies predicting the downfall of Assyria in-
deed came true: As invaders from the north and east were joined by
rebellious Babylonians from the south, Ashur, the religious capi-
tal, fell in 614 b.c., and Nineveh, the royal capital, was captured
and sacked two years later. The great Assyria was no more.

The disintegration of the Assyrian empire was seized by vassal
kings in Egypt and Babylonia as an opportunity to attempt the res-
toration of their own hegemonies. The lands between them were
once again the cherished prize, and the Egyptians, under the Pha-
raoh Necho, were quicker in invading these territories.

In Babylonia, Nebuchadnezzar II — as recorded in his inscrip-
tions — was ordered by the god Marduk to march his army west-
ward. The expedition was made possible because “another god,”
the one who held the original sovereignty over the area, “has not
desired the cedar land” anymore; and now “a foreign enemy was
ruling and robbing it.”

In Jerusalem the word of the Lord Yahweh through his prophet
Jeremiah was to side with Babylon, for the Lord Yahweh— calling

20

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Nebuchadnezzar “my servant”— had decided to make the Babylo-
nian king the instrument of His wrath against the gods of Egypt:

Thus sayeth Yahweh, Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel:
“Indeed will I send for and fetch Nebuchadnezzar, my ser-
vant. . . .

And he shall smite the land of Egypt,
and deliver such as are for death to death,
and such as are for captivity to captivity,
and such as are for the sword to the sword.

And I will kindle a fire in the house of Egypt’s gods,
and he will bum them. . . .

And he will break the obelisks of Heliopolis,
the one which is in the land of Egypt;

The houses of the gods of Egypt shall he bum with fire.”

In the course of this campaign the Lord Yahweh announced that
Jerusalem, too, shall be punished on account of its people’s sins,
having taken up the worship of the “Queen of Heaven” and of the
gods of Egypt: “Mine anger and my fury shall be poured upon this
place. . . and it shall bum and shall not be quenched. . . . In the
city on which my name has been called, the doom will I begin.”
And so it was that in the year 586 b.c. “Nebuzaraddan, captain of
the guard of the king of Babylon, came into Jerusalem; and he
burned the House of Yahweh, and the king’s house, and all the
houses of Jerusalem . . . and all the walls around Jerusalem were
tom down by the army of the Chaldeans.” This desolation, Yah-
weh promised, however, would last only seventy years.

The king who was to fulfill this promise and enable the re-
building of the Temple of Jerusalem was Cyrus. His ancestors,
speaking an Indo-European language, are believed to have mi-
grated south from the Caspian Sea area to the province of Anshan
along the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf. There Hakham-Anish
(“Wise Man”), the leader of the migrants, began a dynasty we call
Achaemenid; his descendants— Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes— made his-
tory as rulers of what was to be the Persian empire.

When Cyrus ascended the throne of Anshan in 549 b.c., his
land was a distant province of Elam and Media. In Babylon, then
the center of power, the kingship was held by Nabunaid, who be-
came king under most unusual circumstances: not by the custom-
ary choice by the god Marduk, but as a result of a unique pact
between a High Priestess (the mother of Nabunaid) and the god

Sin. A partly damaged tablet contains the eventual indictment of
Nabunaid: “He set an heretical statue upon a base ... he called its
name ‘the god Sin’. . . . At the proper time of the New Year Fes-
tival, he advised that there be no celebrations. ... He con-
founded the rites and upset the ordinances.”

While Cyrus was busy fighting the Greeks of Asia Minor, Mar-
duk— seeking to restore his position as the national god of Baby-
lon — “scanned and looked throughout the countries, searching for
a righteous ruler willing to be led. And he called out the name of
Cyrus, King of Anshan, and pronounced his name to be ruler of all
the lands.”

After the first deeds of Cyrus proved to be in accord with the
god’s wishes, Marduk “ordered him to march against his own city
Babylon. He made him [Cyrus] set out on the road to Babylon,
going at his side like a real friend.” Thus, literally accompanied by
the Babylonian god, Cyrus was able to take Babylon without
bloodshed. On a day equivalent to March 20, 538 b.c., Cyrus
“held the hands of Bel [The Lord[ Marduk” in Babylon's sacred
precinct. On New Year’s Day his son, Cambyses, officiated at the
restored festival honoring Marduk.

Cyrus left his successors an empire that encompassed all the
earlier empires and kingdoms but one. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon,
and Assyria in Mesopotamia; Elam and Media to the east; the
lands to the north; the Hittite and Greek lands in Asia Minor;
Phoenicia and Canaan and Philistia — all had now come under one
sovereign king and one supreme god, Ahura-Mazda, God of Truth
and Light. He was depicted in ancient Persia (Fig. 5a) as a bearded
deity roaming the skies within a Winged Disc— very much in the
manner in which the Assyrians had depicted their supreme god,
Ashur (Fig. 5b).

When Cyrus died in 529 b.c., the only remaining independent
land with its independent gods was Egypt. Four years later his son
and successor, Cambyses, led his troops along the Mediterranean
coast of the Sinai peninsula and defeated the Egyptians at Pelu-
sium; a few months later he entered Memphis, the Egyptian royal
capital, and proclaimed himself a Pharaoh.

Despite his victory, Cambyses carefully refrained from em-
ploying in his Egyptian inscriptions the usual opening formula
“the great god, Ahura-Mazda, chose me.” Egypt, he recognized,
did not come within the domains of this god. In deference to the
independent gods of Egypt, Cambyses prostrated himself before
their statues, accepting their dominion. In return the Egyptian

Fig. 5

priests legitimized his rule over Egypt by granting him the title
“Offspring of Ra.”

The ancient world was now united under one king, chosen by the
“great god of truth and light” and accepted by the gods of Egypt.
Neither men nor gods had cause left to war with each other. Peace
on Earth!

But peace failed to last. Across the Mediterranean Sea, the
Greeks were increasing in wealth, power, and ambitions. Asia Mi-
nor, the Aegean Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean saw increasing
clashes, both local and international. In 490 b.c., Darius I at-
tempted to invade Greece and was defeated at Marathon; nine
years later Xerxes I was defeated at Salamis. A century and a half
later Alexander of Macedonia crossed over from Europe to launch
a campaign of conquest that saw the blood of men flow in all the
ancient lands as far as India.

Was he carrying out a “trustworthy command” of the gods? On

The Wars of Man

23

the contrary. Believing a legend that he was fathered by an Egyp-
tian god, Alexander at first fought his way to Egypt to hear the
god’s oracle confirm his semidivine origins. But the oracle also
predicted his early death, and Alexander's travels and conquests
were thereafter motivated by a search for the Waters of Life, so
that he might drink of them and evade his fate.

He died, in spite of all the carnage, young and in his prime. And
ever since, the Wars of Men have been the wars of men alone.

4

2

THE CONTENDING OF HORUS
AND SETH

Was it a sad commentary on the history of warfare that the messi-
anic Essenes envisioned the Final War of Men as one in which the
Company of the Divine would join the Congregation of the Mor-
tals, and the “war cries of gods and men” would mingle on the
battlefield?

Not at all. What The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of
Darkness had envisioned was simply that human warfare shall end
just as it had begun: with gods and men fighting side by side.

Incredible as it may sound, a document does exist that describes
the first war in which the gods involved mortal men. It is an in-
scription on the walls of the great temple at Edfu, an ancient Egyp-
tian holy city that was dedicated to the god Homs. It was there,
Egyptian traditions held, that Homs established a foundry of “di-
vine iron” and where, in a special enclosure, he maintained the
great Winged Disk that could roam the skies. “When the doors of
the foundry open,” an Egyptian text declared, “the Disk riseth

up”: O O 1

The inscription (Fig. 6), remarkable for its geographical ac-
curacy, begins with an exact date — a date not in the affairs of
men but of the gods. It deals with events when the gods them-
selves, long before the Pharaohs, reigned over Egypt:

In the year 363 His Majesty, Ra, the Holy One, the Falcon of
the Horizon, the Immortal Who Forever Lives, was in the land
of Khenn. He was accompanied by his warriors, for the enemies
had conspired against their lord in the district which has been
called Ua-Ua since that day.

Ra went there in his boat, his companions with him. He
landed in the district of the Throne Place of Homs, in the west-
ern part of this district, east of the House of Khennu, the one
which has been called Royal Khennu from that time on.

25

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

2*

Horns, the Winged Measurer, came to the boat of Ra. He said
to his forefather: “O Falcon of the Horizon, 1 have seen the en-
emy conspire against thy Lordship, to take the Luminous Crown
unto themselves.”

i i r

O

l ^r-n n o

A

«Q I

O A

(W)

oHS

Fig. 6

&

With a few words the ancient scribe succeeded in drawing the
background as well as setting the stage for the unusual war that was
about to unfold. We gather at once that the fighting was brought on by
a conspiracy by certain “enemies” of the gods Ra and Homs, to take
away the “Luminous Crown of Lordship” unto themselves. This, ob-
viously, could have been done only by some other god or gods. To
forestall the conspiracy Ra— “accompanied by his warriors”— went
in his boat to a district where Homs had set up his headquarters.

X

s

The Contending of Horus and Seth 27

The “boat” of Ra, as is known from many other texts, was a Ce-
lestial Boat in which Ra could soar to the farthest heavens. In this
instance Ra used it to land faraway from any waters, “in the west-
ern part” of the district of Ua-Ua. There he landed east of the
“Throne Place” of Horus. And Horus came out to greet his forefa-
ther and reported to him that “the enemy” was gathering its
forces.

Then Ra, the Holy One, the Falcon of the Horizon, said
unto Horus, the Winged Measurer: “Lofty issue of Ra, my
begotten: Go quickly, knock down the enemy whom you
have seen.”

So instructed, Horus took off in the Winged Disk to search for
the enemy from the skies:

So Homs, the Winged Measurer, flew up toward the horizon
in the Winged Disk of Ra; it is therefore that he has been called
from that day on “Great God, Lord of the Skies.”

From the skies, flying in the Winged Disk, Homs spotted the en-
emy forces and unleashed upon them a “storm” that could neither
be seen nor heard, yet it brought instantaneous death:

In the heights of the skies, from the Winged Disk, he saw the
enemies, and came upon them from behind. From his forepart
he let loose against them a Storm which they could neither see
with their eyes, nor hear with their ears. It brought death to all of
them in a single moment; not a being remained alive through
this.

Homs then flew back to the boat of Ra in the Winged Disk,
“which shined in many colors,” and heard his victory made offi-
cial by Thoth, the god of magical crafts:

Then Homs, the Winged Measurer, reappeared in the Winged
Disk, which shined in many colors; and he came back to the boat
of Ra, the Falcon of the Horizon.

And Thoth said: “O Lord of the gods! The Winged Measurer
has returned in the great Winged Disk, shining with many col-
ors”. . . .

28

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Therefore is he named from that day on “The Winged Mea-
surer.” And they named after Homs, the Winged Measurer, the
city of Hut “Behutet,” from that day on.

It was in Upper Egypt that the first battle, above reported, had
taken place between Homs and “the enemies.” Heinrich Brugsch,
who first published the text of the inscription back in 1870 (Die
Sage von der gefliigten Sonnenscheibe), suggested that the “Land
of Khenn” was Nubia, and that Homs had spotted the enemies at
Syene (today’s Aswan). More recent studies, such as Egypt in Nu-
bia by Walter B. Emery, agree that Ta-Khenn was Nubia and that
Ua-Ua was the name of its northern part, the area between the
Nile’s first and second cataracts. (The southern part of Nubia was
called Kush.) These identifications seem valid, since the city of
Behutet, which was granted to Homs as a prize for his first victory,
was the very city of Edfu, which has been dedicated to Homs ever
since.

Traditions held that Edfu was where Homs established a divine
metal foundry, at which unique weapons made of “divine iron”
were forged. It was there, too, that Homs trained an army of
mesniu — “Metal People.” They were depicted on the walls of the
temple of Edfu as men with shaven heads, wearing a short tunic
and a deep collar, carrying weapons in each hand. A depiction of
an unidentified, harpoonlike weapon was included in the hi-

eroglyphic words for “divine iron” and "metal people.”

The mesniu were, according to Egyptian traditions, the first men
ever to have been armed by the gods with weapons made of metal.
They also were, as we shall soon gather from the unfolding tale,
the first men to have been enlisted by a god to fight in the wars be-
tween the gods.

The area between Aswan and Edfu now firmly secured, and
men-warriors armed and trained, the gods were ready to advance
northward, toward the heartland of Egypt. The initial victories ap-
parently also strengthened the alliance of the gods, for we are told
that the Asiatic goddess Ishtar (the Egyptian text calls her by her
Canaanite name, Ashtoreth) had joined the group. Hovering in the
sky, Homs called on Ra to scout the land below:

And Homs said: “Advance, O Ra! Look for the enemies who
are lying below, upon the land!”

Then Ra, the Holy One, travelled forth; and Ashtoreth was

The Contending of Horus and Seth 29

with him. And they looked for the enemies upon the land; but
each one of them was hidden.

Since the enemies on the land were hidden from sight, Ra had an
idea: “And Ra said unto the gods accompanying him: ‘Let us
guide our vessel toward the water, for the enemy lies in the land.’
And they called the waters ‘The Travelled Waters’ from that day
on.” While Ra could utilize the amphibious capabilities of his ve-
hicle, Homs was in need of a waterborne vessel. So they gave him
a boat, “and called it Mak-A (Great Protector) unto this day.”

It was then that the first battle involving mortal men ensued:

But the enemies too went into the waters, making themselves
as crocodiles and hippopotami, and they were striking at the boat
of Ra, the Falcon of the Horizon. . . .

It was then that Homs, the Winged Measurer, came along
with his helpers, those who served as warriors, each one called
by name, with the Divine Iron and a chain in their hands, and
they beat off the crocodiles and the hippopotami.

And they hauled up 651 enemies to that place; they were
killed in sight of the city.

And Ra, the Falcon of the Horizon, said unto Homs, the
Winged Measurer: “Let this place be known as the place where
thine victory in the southlands has been established.”

Having vanquished their enemies from the skies, on land, and in
the waters, the victory of Homs seemed complete; and Thoth
called for a celebration:

Then said Thoth unto the other gods: “O Gods of Heaven, let
your hearts rejoice! O Gods of Earth, let your hearts rejoice! The
young Homs has brought peace, having performed extraordi-
nary feats in this campaign.”

It was then that the Winged Disk was adopted as the emblem of
Homs victorious:

It is from that day that the metal emblems of Homs have
existed. It was Homs who had fashioned as his emblem the
Winged Disk, placing it upon the forepart of the boat of Ra. The
goddess of the north and the goddess of the south, represented as
two serpents, he placed alongside.

30

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

And Homs stood behind the emblem, upon the boat of Ra, the
Divine Iron and the chain in his hand.

In spite of the proclamation of Homs by Thoth as a bringer of
peace, peace was not yet in hand. As the company of the gods kept
advancing northward, ‘‘they glimpsed two brightnesses on a plain
southeast of Thebes. And Ra said to Thoth: ‘This is the enemy;
let Homs slaughter them. . . . And Homs made a great massacre
among them.”

Once again, with the aid of the amiy of men he had trained and
armed, Homs was victorious; and Thoth kept naming the locations
after the successful battles.

While the first aerial battle broke through the defenses separat-
ing Egypt from Nubia at Syene (Aswan), the ensuing battles on
land and watersecured for Homs the bend of the Nile, from Thebes
to Dendera. There great temples and royal sites proliferated in days
to come. Now the way was open into the heartland of Egypt.

For several days the gods advanced northward— Homs keeping
watch from the skies in the Winged Disk, Ra and his companions
sailing down the Nile, and the Metal People guarding the Hanks on
land. A series of brief, but fierce, encounters then ensued; the
place names— well established in ancient Egyptian geography—
indicate that the attacking gods reached the area of lakes that had
stretched in antiquity from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean
(some of which still remain):

Then the enemies distanced themselves from him, toward the
north. They placed themselves in the water district, facing the
back-sea of the Mediterranean; and their hearts were stricken
with fear of him.

But Homs, the Winged Measurer, followed close behind
them in the boat of Ra, the Divine Iron in his hand.

And all his Helpers, armed with weapons of iron forged, were
staged all around.

But the attempt to surround and entrap the enemies did not suc-
ceed: “For four days and four nights he roamed the waters in pur-
suit of them, without seeing even one of the enemies.” Ra then
advised him to go up again in the Winged Disk, and this time Ho-
rns was able to see the fleeing enemies; “he hurled his Divine
Lance after them and he slew them, and performed a great over-

The Contending of Horus and Seth 31

throw of them. He also brought 142 enemy prisoners to the forepart
of the boat of Ra,” where they were quickly executed.

The Edfu temple inscription now shifts to a new panel, for in-
deed there began a new chapter in that War of the Gods. The ene-
mies that had managed to escape “directed themselves by the
Lake of the North, setting themselves toward the Mediterranean,
which they desired to reach by sailing through the water district.
But the god smote their hearts [with fear], and when they reached
the middle of the waters as they fled, they directed themselves
from the western lake to the waters which connect with the lakes of
the district Mer, in order to join themselves there with the enemies
who were the Land of Seth.”

These verses provide not only geographical information; they
also identify “the enemies” for the first time. The conflict had
shifted to the chain of lakes that in antiquity, much more than now-
adays, physically separated Egypt proper from the Sinai peninsula.
To the east, beyond this watery barrier, lay the domain of Seth—
the erstwhile adversary and slayer of Osiris, the father of Horus.
Seth, we now learn, was the enemy against whose forces Homs
had been advancing from the south. And now Homs reached the
line dividing Egypt from the Land of Seth.

For a while there was a lull in the fighting, during which Homs
brought up to the front line his armed Metal People, and Ra
reached the scene in his boat. The enemies, too, regrouped and
crossed back the waters, and a major battle followed. This time,
381 of the enemy were captured and executed (no casualty figures
on the side of Homs are ever given in the text); and Homs, in hot
pursuit, crossed the waters into the territory of Seth.

It was then, according to the inscription in the great temple
of Edfu, that Seth was so enraged that he faced Homs for a series of
battles— on the ground and in the air— for god-to-god combat. Of
this combat there have been found several versions, as we shall
see. What is interesting at this point is the fact brought out by E. A.
Wallis Budge in The Gods of the Egyptians: that in the first in-
volvement of men in the Wars of the Gods, it was the arming of
mankind with the Divine Iron that brought victory to Homs: “It is
pretty clear that he owed his success chiefly to the superiority of the
weapons with which he and his men were armed, and to the mate-
rial of which they were made.”

Thus, according to Egyptian writings, did man learn to lift
sword against man.

When all the fighting was over, Ra expressed satisfaction with

32

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

the works of “these Metal People of Homs,” and he decreed that
henceforth they “shall dwell in sanctuaries” and shall be served
with libations and offerings “as their reward, because they have
slain the enemies of the god Horus.” They were settled at Edfu,
the Upper Egypt capital of Elorus, and in This (Tanis in Greek, the
biblical Zo’an), the Lower Egypt capital of the god. In time they
outgrew their purely military role and attained the title Shamsu-Hor
(“Attendants of Horus”), serving as his human aides and emissar-
ies.

The inscription on the temple walls at Edfu, it has been estab-
lished, was a copy of a text that was known to the Egyptian scribes
from earlier sources; but when and by whom the original text had
been composed, no one can really tell. Scholars who have studied
the inscription have concluded that the accurate geographical and
other data in the text indicate (in the words of E. A. Wallis Budge)
“that we are not dealing entirely with mythological events; and it
is nearly certain that the triumphant progress ascribed to Hor-
Behutet (Horus of Edfu) is based upon the exploits of some victori-
ous invader who established himself at Edfu in very early times.”

As with all Egyptian historical texts, this one, too, begins with a
date: “In the year 363.” Such dates always indicate the year in the
reign of the Pharaoh to whom the event pertains: each Pharaoh had
his first year, second year, and so on. The text in question, how-
ever, deals not with the affairs of kings but with divine matters— a
war among the gods. The text thus relates events that had happened
in the “year 363” in the reign of certain gods and takes us back to
the early times when gods, not men, ruled over Egypt.

That there indeed had been such a time, Egyptian traditions left
no doubt. The Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century' b.c.), on
his extensive visit to Egypt, was given by the priests details of the
Pharaonic dynasties and reigns. “The priests,” he wrote, “said
that Men was the first king of Egypt, and that it was he who raised
the dyke which protects Memphis from the inundations of the
Nile,” diverted the river, and proceeded to build Memphis on the
reclaimed land. “Besides these works he also, the priests said,
built the temple of Vulcan, which stands within the city, a vast edi-
fice, very worthy of mention.

“Next they read me from a papyrus the names of 330 ntonarchs
who were his successors upon the throne. In this number of succes-
sors there were eighteen Ethiopian kings, and one queen who was a
native; all the rest were kings and Egyptians.”

33

The Contending of Horus and Seth

The priests then showed Herodotus rows of statues representing
the successive Pharaohs and related to him various details per-
taining to some of these kings and their claims to divine ancestry.
“The beings represented by these images were very far indeed
from being gods,” Herodotus commented; “however,” he went
on to say:

In times preceding them it was otherwise: Then Egypt had
gods for its rulers, who dwelt upon the Earth with men, one of
them being always supreme above the rest.

The last of these was Homs, the son of Osiris, whom the
Greeks called Apollo. He deposed Typhon, and ruled over
Egypt as its last god-king.

In his book Against Apion, the first-century Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus quoted as one of his sources on the history of
Egypt the writings of an Egyptian priest named Manetho. Such
writings were never found; but any doubt regarding the existence
of such a historian was dispelled when it was realized that his writ-
ings formed the basis for several works by later Greek historians. It
is now established with certainty that Manetho (his hieroglyphic
name meant “Gift of Thoth”), indeed a high priest and great
scholar, compiled the history of Egypt in several volumes at the
command of king Ptolemy Philadelphus circa 270 b.c. The origi-
nal manuscript was deposited in the great library of Alexandria,
only to perbh there together with numerous other invaluable docu-
ments when the building and its contents were set on fire by
Muslim conquerors in a.d. 642.

Manetho was the first known historian to have divided the Egyp-
tian rulers into dynasties— a practice continued to this day. His
King List— names, lengths of reign, order of succession, and some
other pertinent information— has been mainly preserved through
the writings of Julius Africanus and Eusebius of Caesarea (in the
third and fourth centuries a.d.). These and other versions based
on Manetho agree that he listed as the first ruler of the first dy-
nasty of Pharaohs the king Men (Menes in Greek)— the very
same king that Herodotus reported, based on his own investi-
gations in Egypt.

This fact has since been confirmed by modem discoveries, such
as the Tablet of Abydos (Fig. 7) in which the Pharaoh Seti I, ac-
companied by his son, Ramses II, listed the names of seventy-five
of his predecessors. The first one to be named is Mena.

35

The Contending of Horus and Seth

If Herodotus was correct in regard to the dynasties of Egyptian
Pharaohs, could he also have been right in regard to a “preceding
time” when “Egypt had gods for its rulers”?

Manetho, we find, had agreed with Herodotus also on that mat-
ter. The dynasties of the Pharaohs, he wrote, were preceded by
four other dynasties — two of gods, one of demigods, and a transi-
tional dynasty. At first, he wrote, seven great gods reigned over
Egypt for a total of 12,300 years:

Ptah

ruled

9,000 years

Ra

ruled

1 ,000 years

Shu

ruled

700 years

Geb

ruled

500 years

Osiris

ruled

450 years

Seth

ruled

350 years

Horus

ruled

300 years

Seven gods ruled 12,300 years

The second dynasty of gods, Manetho wrote, consisted of
twelve divine rulers, the first of whom was the god Thoth; they
reigned for 1,570 years. In all, he said, nineteen gods ruled for
13,870 years. Then there followed a dynasty of thirty demigods,
who reigned for 3,650 years; in all, there were forty-nine divine
and semidivine rulers over Egypt, reigning a total of 1 7,520 years.
Then, for 350 years, there was no ruler over the whole of Egypt; it
was a chaotic time, during which ten human rulers continued the
kingship at This. Only thereafter did Men establish the first human
dynasty of Pharaohs and built a new capital dedicated to the god
Ptah— the “Vulcan” of Herodotus.

A century and a half of archaeological discoveries and the deci-
phering of the hieroglyphic writing have convinced scholars that
the Pharaonic dynasties probably began in Egypt circa 3100 b.c.;
indeed, under a ruler whose hieroglyph reads Men. He united Up-
per and Lower Egypt and established his capital at a new city called
Men-Nefer (“The Beauty of Men”) — Memphis in Greek. His ac-
cession to this throne of a united Egypt had indeed followed a cha-
otic period of a disunited Egypt, as Manetho had stated. An
inscription on an artifact known as the Palermo Stone has pre-
served at least nine archaic names of kings who wore only the Red
Crown of Lower Egypt and who ruled before Menes. Tombs and

l'HE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

3 |

actual artifacts have been found belonging to archaic kings bearing
such names as “Scorpion,” Ka, Zeser, Narmer, and Sma. Sir Flin-
ders Petrie, the noted Egyptologist, claimed in his The Royal Tombs of
the First Dynasty and other writings that these names correspond to
names given by Manetho in the list often human rulers who reigned at
Tanis during the chaotic centuries. Petrie suggested that this group,
which preceded the First Dynasty, be called “Dynasty O.”

A major archaeological document dealing with Egyptian kingship,
the so-called Turin Papyrus, begins with a dynasty of gods that lists
Ra, Geb, Osiris, Seth, and Homs, then Thoth, Maat, and others, and
assigns to Homs— just as Manetho did— a reign of 300 years. This
papyms, which dates from the time of Ramses II, lists after the divine
miens thirty-eight semidivine rulers: “Nineteen Chiefs of the White
Wall and nineteen Venerables of the North.” Between them and
Menes, the Turin Papyms states, there mled human kings under the
patronage of Homs; their epithet was Shamsu-Hor!

Addressing the Royal Society of Literature in London in 1843,
the curator of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, Dr.
Samuel Birch, announced that he had counted on the papyms and its
fragments a total of 330 names— a number that “coincided with the
330 kings mentioned by Herodotus.”

Even if they disagree among themselves on details, Egyptolo-
gists now agree that the archaeological discoveries sustain the
information provided by the ancient historians concerning the dy-
nasties begun by Menes, following a chaotic period of about ten
rulers in a disunited Egypt; and that there had been a prior period
when Egypt was united under mlers whose names could have been
none other than Horus, Osiris, and so on. However, scholars who
find it difficult to accept that these mlers were “gods” suggest
that they were only “deified” human beings.

To throw more light on the subject, we can start with the very place
chosen by Menes for the capital of the reunified Egypt. The location
of Memphis, we find, was not a matter of chance; it was related to cer-
tain events pertaining to the gods. Nor was the manner in which
Memphis was built unsymbolic: Menes built the city on an artificial
mound, created through the diversion of the Nile at that spot and other
extensive damming, dyking, and land-reclamation works. This he did
in emulation of the manner in which Egypt itself had been created.

The Egyptians believed that “a veiy great god who came forth in
the earliest times” arrived in the land and found it lying under
water and mud. He undertook great works of dyking and land rec-
lamation, literally raising Egypt out of the waters— thus explaining

37

The Contending of Horus and Seth

Egypt’s nickname “The Raised Land.” This olden god was named
Ptah — a “God of Heaven and Earth.” He was considered to be a
great engineer and master artificer.

The veracity of the legend of The Raised Land is enhanced by its
technological aspects. The Nile is a peaceful and navigable river
up to Syene (Aswan); beyond that, the river’s southward course is
treacherous and obstructed by several cataracts. Just as the level of
the Nile is regulated today by the dams at Aswan, so apparently
was it in prehistoric Egypt. Ptah, Egyptian legends held, estab-
lished his base of operations on the island of Abu, the one called
since Greek times Elephantine on account of its shape; it is located
just above the first cataract of the Nile, at Aswan. In text and draw-
ings (Fig. 8) Ptah, whose symbol was the serpent, was depicted as

38

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

controlling the Nile’s waters from subterranean caverns. “It
was he who kept the doors that held the inundations, who drew
back the bolts at the proper time. ’ ’ In technical language we are
being informed that at the most appropriate site from an engi-
neering point of view, Ptah built “twin caverns” (two con-
nected reservoirs) whose locks could be opened and closed,
“bolted” and unbolted, thus regulating artificially the level
and flow of the Nile’s waters.

Ptah and the other gods were called, in Egyptian, Mr— “Guard-
ian, Watcher.” They had come to Egypt, the Egyptians wrote,
from Ta-Ur, the “Far/Foreign Land,” whose name Ur meant
“olden” but could have also been the actual place name— a place
well known from Mesopotamian and biblical records: the ancient
city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia. And the straits of the Red Sea,
which connected Mesopotamia and Egypt, were called Ta-Neter,
the “Place of the Gods,” the passage by which they had come to
Egypt. That the earliest gods did come from the biblical lands of
Shem is additionally borne out by the puzzling fact that the names
of these olden gods were of “Semitic” (Akkadian) derivation.
Thus Ptah, which had no meaning in Egyptian, meant “he who
fashioned things by carving and opening up” in the Semitic
tongues.

In time— after 9,000 years, according to Manetho— Ra, a son of
Ptah, became the ruler over Egypt. His name, too, had no meaning
in Egyptian, but because Ra was associated with a bright celestial
body, scholars assume that Ra meant “bright.” We do know with
greater certainty that one of his nicknames, Tem, had the Semitic
connotation “the Complete, the Pure One.”

It was believed by the Egyptians that Ra, too, had come to Earth
from the “Planet of Millions of Years” in a Celestial Barge, the
conical upper part of which, called Ben-Ben (“Pyramidion Bird”),
was later on preserved in a specially built shrine in the sacred city
Anu (the biblical On, which is better known by its Greek name He-
liopolis). In dynastic times Egyptians made pilgrimages to this
shrine to view the Ben-Ben and other relics associated with Ra and
the celestial travels of the gods. It was to Ra as Tem that the Israel-
ites were forced to build the city called in the Bible Pi-Tom— “The
Gateway of Tem.”

It was the Heliopolitan priests who first recorded the traditions
of the gods of Egypt and who related that the first “company” of
the gods headed by Ra consisted of nine “Guardians”— Ra and

39

The Contending of Homs and Seth

four divine couples who followed him. The first divine couple to
rule when Ra tired of staying in Egypt were his own children, the
male Shu (“Dryness”) and the female Tefnut (“Moisture”); their
main task, according to Egyptian tales, was to help Ra control the
skies over the Earth.

Shu and Tefnut set the example for mortal Pharaohs in later
times: the king selected his own half-sister as his royal spouse.
They were followed on the divine throne— as both legends and
Manetho inform us— by their children, again a brother-sister cou-
ple: Geb (“Who Piles Up the Earth”) and Nut (“The Stretched-out
Firmament”).

The purely mythological approach to the Egyptian tales of the
gods — that of primitive people watching Nature and seeing “gods”
in its phenomena — has led scholars to assume that Geb represented
the Earth deified, and Nut the Heavens; and that by calling Geb
and Nut Father and Mother of the gods who thereafter reigned over
Egypt, the Egyptians believed that the gods were born of the
union of Earth and Heaven. But if the legends and verses in the
Pyramid Texts and The Book of the Dead are to be taken more
literally, it appears that Geb and Nut were so named on account
of activities related to the periodic appearance of the Bennu
bird, from which the Greeks obtained the legend of the Phoe-
nix: an eagle whose feathers were red and gold, which died and
reappeared at intervals lasting several millennia. It was for that
bird— whose name was the same as that of the contraption in
which Ra landed on Earth— that Geb engaged in great earth-
works and Nut “stretched out the firmament of the sky.” These
feats, it appears, were carried out by the gods in the “Land of
the Lions”; it was there that Geb “hath opened up the earth”
for the great spherical object that came from the “stretched-out
skies" and appeared on the horizon.

In the aftermath of the above-described feats, Geb and Nut
turned over the direct rule of Egypt to their four children: Asar
(“The All-Seeing”), whom the Greeks called Osiris, and his sister-
wife Ast, better known as Isis; and Seth and his wife Nephtys
(Nebt-Hat, "Lady of the House”), the sister of Isis. It was with
these gods, who were truly gods of Egypt, that the Egyptian tales
most concerned themselves; but in depicting them (Fig. 9) Seth
was never shown without his animal disguise: his face was never
seen, and the meaning of his name still defies Egyptologists, even
if it is identical to the name given in the Bible to Adam and Eve’s
third son.

Fig. 9

With two brothers who married their own two sisters, the gods
confronted a serious problem of succession. The only plausible so-
lution was to divide the kingdom: Osiris was given the northern
lowlands (Lower Egypt), and Seth was given the southern, moun-
tainous part (Upper Egypt). How long this arrangement lasted we
can only guess from Manetho’s chronicles; but it is certain that
Seth was not satisfied with the division of sovereignty and resorted
to various schemes to gain control over the whole of Egypt.

Scholars have assumed that the sole motive of Seth was a crav-
ing for power. But once one grasps what the gods’ rules of succes-
sion were, it becomes possible to understand the profound effect
these rules had upon the affairs of the gods (and then of human
kings). Since the gods (and then men) could have, in addition to the
official spouse, one or more concubines, as well as beget children
through illicit love affairs, the first rule of succession was this: the
son first bom to the official spouse was the heir to the throne. If the
official spouse bore no son, the son first bom to any of the concu-
bines became the heir. However, if at any time, even after the birth
of the Firstborn heir, a son was bom to the ruler by his own half-
sister, this son superseded the Firstborn and became the Legal
Heir.

It was this custom that was the cause of much rivaliy and strife
among the Gods of Heaven and Earth and— we suggest— explains
the basic motivation of Seth. Our source for this suggestion is the
treatise De Iside et Osiride (Of Isis and Osiris ) by Plutarch, a
historian-biographer of the first century a.d., who wrote
down for the Greeks and Romans of his time the legendary histo-

41

The Contending of Horus and Seth

ries of the Near Eastern gods. The Egyptian sources on which he
relied were believed at the time to have been writings of the god
Thoth himself, who, as the Scribe of the Gods, recorded for all
times their histories and deeds upon this Earth.

“Now the story of Isis and Osiris, its most significant [retained]
and superfluous parts omitted, is thus briefly related,” wrote Plu-
tarch in his opening sentence and went on to tell that Nut (whom
the Greeks compared with their goddess Rhea) had mothered three
sons: the firstborn was Osiris, the last Seth. She also gave birth to
two daughters, Isis and Nephtys. But not all of these children were
really fathered by Geb: only Seth and Nephtys were. Osiris and his
second brother were in truth fathered by the god Ra, who came
unto his granddaughter Nut in stealth; and Isis was fathered by
Thoth (the Greek god Hermes) who, “being likewise in love with
the same goddess,” reciprocated in various ways “in recompense
for the favours which he had received from her.”

The setting, then, was this: the firstborn was Osiris, and, though
not by Geb, his claim to the succession was even greater, having
been fathered by the great Ra himself. But the legitimate heir was
Seth, having been bom to the ruling Geb by his half-sister Nut. As
if this were not enough, matters were further complicated by the
race between the two brothers to assure that their son would be the
next legitimate successor. To achieve that Seth could have fathered
a son only by his half-sister Isis, whereas Osiris could achieve this
by fathering a son by either Isis or Nephtys (both being only half-
sisters to him). But Osiris deliberately blocked Seth’s chances to
have his descendants rule over Egypt by taking Isis as his spouse.
Seth then married Nephtys; but as she was his full sister, none of
their offspring could qualify.

So was the stage set for Seth’s increasingly violent rage against
Osiris, who deprived him both of the throne and of the succession.

The occasion for Seth’s revenge, according to Plutarch, was the
visit to Egypt of “a certain queen of Ethiopia named Aso.” In con-
spiracy with his supporters Seth held a banquet in her honor, to
which all the gods were invited. For his scheme Seth had a magnif-
icent chest constructed, large enough to hold Osiris; “This chest he
brought into the banqueting room; where, after it had been much
admired by all who were present, Seth— as though in jest-
promised to give it to any one of them whose body it would fit.
Upon this the whole company, one after the other, went into the
chest.

“Last of all, Osiris lay himself down in it, upon which the con-

42

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

spirators immediately ran together, clapped the cover upon it, and
then fastened it down on the outside with nails, pouring likewise
melted lead over it.” They then carried the chest in which Osiris
was imprisoned to the seashore, and where the Nile flows into the
Mediterranean at Tanis sank the chest in the sea.

Dressed in mourning apparel and cutting off a lock of her hair as
a sign of grief, Isis went in search of the chest. “At length she re-
ceived more particular news of the chest, that it had been carried by
the waves of the sea to the coast of Byblos” (in what is now
Lebanon). Isis retrieved the chest holding the body of Osiris and
hid it in a deserted place until she could figure out how to resurrect
Osiris. But Seth somehow found all that out, seized the chest, and
cut up the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces, which he dispersed
all over Egypt.

Once again Isis went in search of the scattered limbs of her
brother-husband. Some versions say that she buried the parts where
she found them, starting the worship of Osiris at those places;
others say she bound together the parts she found, starting the cus-
tom of mummification. All agree that she found all parts except
one— the phallus of Osiris.

Nevertheless, before finally disposing of the body, she managed
to extract from the body of Osiris its “essence,” and self-insemi-
nated herself with his seed, thus conceiving and giving birth to the
boy Homs. She hid him from Seth in the papyrus swamps of the
Nile delta.

Many legends have been found concerning the events that fol-
lowed; legends copied and recopied on papyri, forming chapters of
The Book of the Dead, or used as verses in the Pyramid texts. Put
together they reveal a major drama that involved legal maneuver-
ing, kidnapping for purposes of state, a magical return from the
dead, homosexuality, and finally a great war— a drama in which
the stake was the Divine Throne of the gods.

Since all seemed to believe that Osiris had perished without
leaving an heir, Seth saw this as his chance to obtain a legitimate
heir by forcing Isis to espouse him. He kidnapped her and held her
prisoner until she consented, but with the aid of the god Thoth, Isis
managed to escape. A version recorded on the so-called Mettemich
Stela, composed as a tale by Isis in her own words, describes her
escape in the night and her adventures until she reached the
swamps where Homs was hidden. She found Homs dying from a
scorpion’s sting (Fig. 10). One can infer from the text that it was
word of her son’s dying that prompted her escape. The people who

The Contending of Horus and Seth

43

lived in the swamps came out at her cries but were helpless to be of
any aid. Then help came from a spacecraft:

Then Isis sent forth a cry to heaven and addressed her appeal
to the Boat of Millions of Years.

And the Celestial Disk stood still, and moved not from the
place where it was.

And Thoth came down, and he was provided with magical
powers, and possessed the great power which made the word be-
come indeed. And he said:

“O Isis, thou goddess, thou glorious one, who has knowledge
of the mouth; behold, no evil shall come upon the child Horus,
for his protection cometh from the Boat of Ra.

“I have come this day in the Boat of the Celestial Disk from
the place where it was yesterday. When the night cometh, this
Light shall drive away [the poison] for the healing of Ho-
rus. . . .

“I have come from the skies to save the child for his mother.”
Revived from death by the artful Thoth and, some texts say, immu-

44 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

nized forever as a result of Thoth’s treatment, Homs grew up as
Netch-atef, “Avenger of his Father.” Educated and trained in mar-
tial arts by goddesses and gods who sided with Osiris, he was
groomed as a Divine Prince worthy of celestial association. Then,
one day, he appeared before the Council of the Gods to claim the
throne of Osiris.

Of the many gods who were surprised by his appearance, none
was more so than Seth. All seemed to wonder: Did Osiris indeed
father this son? As described in a text known as the Chester Beatty
Papyrus No. 1, Seth suggested that the gods’ deliberations be re-
cessed so as to give him a chance to discuss the problem peacefully
with his newly appeared nephew. He invited Homs to “come, let us
pass a happy day in my house,” and Homs agreed. But what Seth had
in mind was not peacemaking; his mind was set on trickery:

And when it was eventide, the bed was spread for them, and
the twain lay thereon.

And in the night Seth caused his member to become stiff, and
he made it go between the loins of Homs.

When the gods next met in council, Seth demanded that the Of-
fice of Ruler be resolved as his, for Homs was disqualified:
whether or not he was of the seed of Osiris, the seed of Seth was
now in him, entitling him to succeed, not precede, Seth!

Now it was the turn of Homs to surprise the gods. When Seth
poured out his semen, “I caught the seed between my hands,” Ho-
ms said. In the morning he showed it to his mother, telling her
what had happened. Isis then made Homs erect his member and
pour his semen into a cup. Then she went to the garden of Seth and
poured the semen of Homs on the lettuce that Seth then unknow-
ingly ate. So, announced Homs, “Not only is Seth’s seed not in
me, but my seed is in him! It is Seth who has been disqualified!”

Baffled, the gods called upon Thoth to resolve the issue. He
checked the semen that Homs had given his mother, which Isis
kept in a pot; it was found to be indeed the semen of Seth. He then
scanned the body of Seth and confirmed that it contained the semen
of Homs. . . .

Enraged, Seth did not wait for the discussions to continue. Only a
fight to the bitter end could now settle the issue, he shouted as he left.

Seth had by then, perManetho, mled 350 years. If we add to this
the time— thirteen years, we believe— it had taken Isis to find the
thirteen parts of the dismembered Osiris, it was indeed “in the year

45

The Contending of Horus and Seth

363” that Ra joined Horus in Nubia, from there to accompany Ho-
ms on his war against “the Enemy.” In Horns, Royal God of
Egypt, S. B. Mercer summed up the scholarly opinions on the sub-
ject with these emphatic words: “The story of the conflict between
Homs and Seth represents a historical event.”

According to the Edfu temple inscription, the first face-to-face
battle between Homs and Seth took place at the “Lake of the
Gods,” thereafter known as the “Lake of Battle.” Homs managed
to hit Seth with his Divine Lance; when Seth fell down, Homs cap-
tured him and brought him before Ra. “His spear was in his
[Seth’s] neck, and the legs of the evil one were chained, and his
mouth had been closed by a blow from the club of the god [Ho-
ms].” Ra decided that Isis and Homs could do with Seth and the
other captured “conspirators” as they pleased.

But as Homs began to slay the captives by cutting off their
heads, Isis had pity on her brother Seth, and set him free. There are
several versions of what ensued, including one known as the
Fourth Sallier Papyrus; and, according to most, the release of Seth
so infuriated Homs that he beheaded his own mother, Isis; but the
god Thoth put her severed head back in place and resurrected her.
(This incident is also reported by Plutarch.)

After his escape Seth at first hid in a subterranean tunnel. After a
lull of six days, a series of aerial battles ensued. Homs took to the
air in a Nar (a “Fiery Pillar”), which was depicted as an elon-
gated, cylindrical vessel equipped with fins or short wings. Its
bulkhead contained two “eyes,” which kept changing color from
blue to red and back to blue; from the rear, jetlike trails were
shown (Fig. 1 1); from the front, the contraption spewed out rays.

4$ THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

(The Egyptian texts, all written by the followers of Horns, contain
no description of Seth’s aerial vehicle.)

The texts describe a battle that ranged far and wide, and the first
to be hit was Horus— struck by a bolt of light from Seth’s vehicle.
The Nar lost one of its “eyes, ’ ’ and Horus continued the fight from
the Winged Disk of Ra. From out of this he shot a “harpoon” at
Seth; now Seth was hit, and lost his testicles. . . .

Dwelling on the nature of the weapon, W. Max MQller wrote in
Egyptian Mythology that it had “a strange, practically impossible
head” and was nicknamed in the hieroglyphic texts “the weapon
of thirty.” As ancient depictions reveal (Fig. 12a), the “harpoon”
was indeed an ingenious three-in-one rocket: as the first, larger
missile was fired, the way was opened for the two smaller missiles
to be launched. The nickname (“Weapon of Thirty”) suggests that
the missiles were what we nowadays call Multiple Warhead Mis-
siles, each missile holding ten warheads.

Through sheer coincidence, but probably because similar cir-
cumstances result in similar connotations, the McDonnell Douglas
Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri, has named its newly devel-
oped naval guided missile “The Harpoon” (Fig. 12b).

The great gods called a truce and once again summoned the ad-
versaries before the Council of the Gods. We glean details of the
deliberations from a text inscribed on a stone column by the Pha-
raoh Shabako (eighth century b.c.), who stated that the text is a
copy made from a very old leather scroll, “devoured by worms,”
which was found buried in the great temple of Ptah at Memphis.
The Council, at first, redivided Egypt between Horus and Seth
along the lines of the division at the time of Osiris, but Geb had
second thoughts and upset the decision, for he was concerned with
the question of continuity: Who would “open the body” to succes-
sive generations? Seth, having lost his testicles, could no longer
have offspring. . . . And so Geb, “Lord Earth, gave as a heritage
to Homs” the whole of Egypt. To Seth a dominion away from
Egypt was to be given; henceforth, he was deemed by the Egyp-
tians to have become an Asiatic deity.

The Council of the Gods adopted the recommendations unani-
mously. Its final action is thus described in the Papyrus of
Hunefer:

Homs is triumphant in the presence of the whole company of
the gods. The sovereignty over the world hath been given unto
him, and his dominion is in the uttermost parts of Earth.

48

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The throne of the god Geb hath been adjudged unto him,
along with the rank which hath been founded by the god Shu.

This legitimization, the Papyrus went on to say:

Hath been formalized by decrees [lodged] in the Chamber of
Records;

It hath been inscribed upon a metal tablet according to the
commandments of thy father Ptah. . . .

Gods celestial and gods terrestrial transfer themselves to the
services of thy son Horus. They follow him to the Hall of De-
crees. He shall lord over them.

3

THE MISSILES OF ZEUS
AND INDRA

After Herodotus had visited Egypt in the fifth century b.c., he was
convinced that it was from the Egyptians that the Greeks had ob-
tained their notions and beliefs of the gods; writing for his country-
men, he employed the names of Greek gods to describe the
comparable Egyptian deities.

His conviction of the Egyptian origin of Greek theology
stemmed not only from comparable attributes and meanings of the
gods’ names, but also (and mostly) from similarities in the tales
concerning them. Of these, one uncanny parallel certainly must
have struck him as no mere coincidence: it was the tale of the cas-
tration of one god by another in a struggle for supremacy.

The Greek sources from which Herodotus could have drawn are,
fortunately, still available: various literary works, such as Homer’s
Iliad; the Odes of Pindar of Thebes, written and well known just
before Herodotus’ time; and first and foremost, the Theogony
(“Divine Genealogy”) by Hesiod, a native of Askara in central
Greece who composed this work and another (Works and Days ) in
the eighth century b.c.

A poet, Hesiod chose to attribute the writing of the Theogony to
the Muses, goddesses of music, literature, and art, who, he wrote,
encouraged him “to celebrate in song” the histories “of the re-
vered race of gods, from the beginning . . . and then to chant of
the race of men and strong giants; and so gladden the heart of Zeus
within Olympus.” This all happened when he was “shepherding
his lambs” one day near the Holy Mountain which was their
abode.

In spite of this pastoral introduction, the tale of the gods as re-
vealed to Hesiod was mostly one of passion, revolt, cunning, and
mutilation; as well as of struggle and global wars. In spite of all the
hymnal glorification of Zeus, there is no apparent attempt to cover
up the chain of bloody violence that had led to his supremacy.

49

50

THE WARS OF GODS ANI) MEN

Whatever the Muses sang of, Hesiod wrote down; and “these
things did sing the Muses, nine daughters begotten of Zeus”:

Verily, at first Chaos came to be,
and next the wide-bosomed Gaea . . .

And dim Tartarus, in the depths of wide-pathed Earth,
and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods . . .

From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Nyx;

And of Nyx were bom Aether and Hemera.

This first group of celestial gods was completed when Gaea
(“Earth”) brought forth Uranus (“Starry Heaven”) and then es-
poused her own firstborn son so that he might be included in the
First Dynasty of the gods. Besides Uranus, and soon after he was
bom, Gaea also gave birth to his graceful sister, Uraea, and to
“Pontus, the fruitless Deep with his raging swell.”

Then the next generation of gods were bom— offspring of
Gaea’s mating with Uranus:

Afterwards she lay with Uranus,
and bare deep-swirling Oceanus;

Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus;

Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne;

And gold-crowned Phoebe, and lovely Thetys.

After them was bom Cronos, the wily,
youngest and most terrible of her children.

In spite of the fact that these twelve were offspring of the mating
of a son with his own mother, the children— six males, six fe-
males— were worthy of their divine origins. But as Uranus got
lustier and lustier, the offspring that followed— though formidable
in might displayed various deformities. First of the “monsters”
to be bom were the three Cyclopes, Brontes (“The Thunderer”),
Steropes (“The Maker of Lightning”), and Arges (“Who Makes
Radiation”); "in all else they were like the gods, but one eye only
was set in the midst of their foreheads; and they were named ‘Orb-
eyed’ (Cyclopes) because one orbed eye was set in their fore-
heads.”

“And again three more sons were born of Gaea and Uranus,
great and valiant beyond telling: Cottus and Briareos and Gyes, au-
dacious children.” Of giant size, the three were called Hekaton-
cheires (“The Hundred-Armed”): “From their shoulders sprang

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra 51

an hundred arms, not to be approached, and each had fifty heads
upon his shoulders.”

“And Cronos hated his lusty sire,” Hesiod wrote; but “Uranus
rejoiced in his evil doing.”

It was then that Gaea “shaped a great sickle and told her plan to
her dear sons,” whereby their “sinful father” would be punished
for his “vile outrages”: to cut off the genitals of Uranus and put an
end to his sexual drives. But “fear seized them all”; and only
“great Cronos, the wily, took courage.”

And so it was that Gaea gave Cronos the sickle she had made of
gray flint and hid him “in an ambush” in her quarters, which were
by the Mediterranean Sea.

And Uranus came at nighttime, longing for love;
and he lay about Gaea, spreading himself upon her.

Then the son from his ambush
stretched forth his left hand to grasp;
and in his right hand he held
the great long sickle with jagged teeth.

Swiftly, he cut off his own father’s genitals,
and cast them away, to fall behind him . . .
into the surging sea.

The deed was done, but the castration of Uranus did not com-
pletely terminate his line of offspring. As his blood gushed forth,
some of the blood drops impregnated Gaea, and she conceived and
bore “the strong Erinyes” (female Furies of vengeance) “and the
great Gigantes with gleaming armor, holding long spears in their
hands; and the Nymphs whom they call Meliae [‘the Nymphs of the
ash tree’].” Of the castrated genitals, leaving a trail of foam as the
surging sea carried them to the island of Cyprus, “there came forth
an awful and lovely goddess . . . gods and men call her Aphrodite
[‘She of the Foam’].”

The incapacitated Uranus called out to the monster-gods for ven-
geance. His own children, he cried out, had become Titans, Strain-
ers who had “strained and did presumptuously the dreadful deed”;
now the other gods had to make sure “that vengeance for it would
afterwards come.” The frightened Cronos then imprisoned the Cy-
clopes and the other monstrous giants far away, so that none would
answer the call of Uranus.

All along, while Uranus was busy bringing forth his own off-
spring, the other gods were also proliferating; their children bore

52

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

names indicating their attributes— by and large benevolent. Now,
after the evil deed, the goddess Nyx responded to his call by bring-
ing forth the deities of evil: “She bare the Destinies and the ruth-
less avenging Fates: Clotho [The Spinner’] and Lachesis |‘The Dis-
poser of Lots’] and Atropos [‘Inevitable’]. . . . She bare Doom and
Black Fate and Death . . . and Blame and Painful Woe . . . Famine
and Sorrows.’’ And she also brought into the world “Deceit and Strife
... as also Fighting, Battles, Murders, Killings, Quarrels, Lying
Words, Disputes, Lawlessness and Ruin.’’ Lastly there was borne by
Nyx Nemesis (“Retribution”). The call of Uranus has been answered:
fighting, battles, and war came to be among the gods.

It was into this dangerous world that the Titans were bringing
forth the third generation of the gods. Fearful of retribution, they
kept closely to each other, five of the six brothers espousing five of
their own six sisters. Of these divine brother-sister couples, most
important was that of Cronos and Rhea, for it was Cronos, by rea-
son of his bold deed, who had assumed the leadership among the
gods. Of this union, Rhea gave birth to three daughters and three
sons: Hestia, Demeter, and Hera; and Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus.

No sooner had one of these children been bom than “the great
Cronos swallowed each . . . intent that no other of the proud Sons
of Heaven should hold kingly office among the deathless gods.”
The reason for eliminating his own offspring by swallowing them
was a prophecy he had learned of, that “strong though he was, he
was destined to be overcome by his own son”: Fate was to repeat
unto Cronos that which he had done unto his father.

But Fate could not be evaded. Wisened to the tricks of Cronos,
Rhea hid her last-bom son Zeus on the island of Crete. To Cronos
she gave instead of the baby “a great stone wrapped in swaddling
clothes.” Not realizing the deception, Cronos swallowed the
stone, thinking it was the baby Zeus. Soon thereafter he began
vomiting, disgorging one by one all the children he had previously
swallowed.

“As the years rolled on, the strength and glorious limbs of the
prince [Zeus] increased quickly.” Fora while, as a worthy grand-
son of the lusty Uranus, Zeus chased lovely goddesses, often get-
ting into trouble with their companion gods. But then he turned his
mind to affairs of state. For ten years a war had been raging be-
tween the older Titans, “the lordly Titans from high Mount
Othyres” (which was their abode), and the younger gods “whom
rich-haired Rhea bare in union with Cronos” and who settled on
the opposite Mount Olympus. “With bitter wrath they were fight-

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra

53

ing continually with one another at that time for ten full years, and
the hard strife had no close or end for either side, and the issue of
war hung evenly balanced.”

Was this fighting merely the culmination of deteriorating rela-
tions between neighboring godly colonies, an outbreak of rivalry
between intermingled and unfaithful gods and goddesses (where
mothers slept with their sons, and uncles impregnated their nieces),
or the first instance of the everlasting rebellion of the young against
the old regime? The Theogony does not provide a clear answer, but
later Greek legends and plays suggest that all these motives com-
bined to create a prolonged and “stubborn war” between the young-
er and the older gods.

It was this ongoing war that was seen by Zeus as his chance to
seize the lordship over the gods and thereby— knowingly or
unknowingly— fulfill the destiny to which his father Cronos had
been fated, by deposing him.

As his first step Zeus “set free from their deadly bonds the
brothers of his father, sons of Uranus, whom his father in his fool-
ishness had bound.” In gratitude, the three Cyclopes gave him the
divine weapons Gaea had hidden away from Uranus: “The Thun-
der, and the Radiating Thunderbolt and the Lightning.” They also
gave Hades a magic helmet, which made its wearer invisible; and
Poseidon received a magical trident, which could make the earth
and sea shake.

To refresh the Hekatoncheires after their long captivity and re-
turn their vigor to them, Zeus provided the trio with “nectar and
ambrosia, the same that the gods eat”; then he addressed them and
said:

Hear me,

O bright children of Uranus and Gaea,
that I may say what my heart within bids me.

A long while now have we,
who are sprung from Cronos, and the Titan gods,
fought with each other every day,
to get victory and to prevail.

Would you now show your great might and strength,
and face the Titans in the bitter strife?

And Cottus, one of the Hundred-Armed, answered him and
said: “Divine one, you speak that which we know well . . .

54

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

through your devising we are come back from the murky gloom
and from our merciless bonds. And so now, with fixed purpose and
deliberate counsel, we will aid your power in the dreadful strife,
and fight against the Titans in hard battle.”

So ‘‘all that were bom of Cronos, together with those dreaded
mighty ones of overwhelming strength whom Zeus brought up to
light. . . they all, both male and female, stirred up the hated battle
that day.” Arrayed against these Olympians were the older Titans,
who also ‘‘eagerly strengthened their ranks.”

As the battle was joined it ranged all over the Earth and in the
skies:

The boundless sea rang terribly around,
and the earth crashed loudly;

Wide heaven was shaken and groaned,
and high Olympus reeled from its foundations
under the charge of the undying gods.

From the deep sound of the gods’ feet,
and the fearful onset of their hard missiles,
the heavy quaking reached even far Tartarus.

In a verse reminiscent of the Dead Sea Scroll text, the Theogony
recalled the war cries of the battling gods:

Thus, then, they launched their grievous
bolts at one another;

And the cry of both armies as they shouted
reached to the starry heaven
as they clashed with a great battle-cry.

Zeus himself was fighting with all his might, using his Divine
Weapons to the utmost. ‘‘From the skies, opposite Mount
Olympus, he came forthwith, hurling his lightning. The bolts
flew thick and fast from his strong hand, Thunder and Light-
ning together, whirling as an awesome flame. The fertile earth
crashed around in burning, and the vast wood crackled aloud
with fire all about. All the land seethed, as did the Sweetwater
streams and the salty sea.”

Then Zeus hurled a Thunder-Stone (Fig. 13) against Mount
Othyres; it was, indeed, nothing short of an atomic explo-
sion:

The hot vapor lapped around the Titans,
of Gaea bom;

Flame unspeakable rose bright to the upper air.

The Flashing glare of the Thunder-Stone,
its lightning, blinded their eyes—
so strong it was.

Astounding heat seized Chaos . . .

It seemed as if Earth and wide Heaven above
had come together;

A mighty crash, as though Earth was hurled to min

5^ THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

“So great a crash was there while the gods clashed together in
strife.”

In addition to the awesome sound, the blinding flash, and the ex-
treme heat, the hurling of the Thunder-Stone also created an im-
mense wind storm:

Also were the winds brought rumbling,
earthquake and duststorm,
thunder and lightning.

All this did the Thunder-Stone of great Zeus bring about. And
when the two contending camps heard and saw what had hap-
pened, “an horrible uproar of terrible strife arose; mighty deeds
were shown; and the battle inclined.” The fighting was abating;
for the gods had the upper hand over the Titans.

“Insatiated for war,” the three Cyclopes set upon the Titans,
overpowering them with hand-held missiles. “They bound them in
bitter chains,” and hurled them into captivity to far Tartarus.
“There, by the counsel of Zeus who rides the clouds, the Titan
gods are hidden under misty gloom, in a dank place at the ends of
huge Earth.” The three Cyclopes stayed there, too, as “trusty
warders of Zeus,” to watch over the imprisoned Titans.

As Zeus was about to claim “the aegis,” the suzerainty over all
the gods, a sudden challenger appeared on the scene. For, “when
Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven, great Gaea bare her
youngest child Typhoeus of the love of Tartarus, with the aid of
golden Aphrodite.” Typhoeus (“Typhon”) was a real monster:
“Strength was with his hands in all that he did, and the feet of the
strong god were untiring. From his shoulders grew an hundred
heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues.
From under the brows of his eyes, in his marvellous heads, fire
flashed; and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there
were voices in all his dreadful heads, which uttered incredible
sounds”: the sound of a man as he speaks, and the sound of a bull,
and that of a lion, and the sound of a puppy. (According to Pindar
and Aeschylus, Typhon was gigantic in height, “and his head
reached to the stars.”)

“Truly a thing past help would have happened on that day,” the
Muses revealed to Hesiod; it was almost inevitable that Typhoeus
“would have come to reign over mortals and immortals.” But
Zeus was quick to perceive the danger and lost no time in attacking
him.

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra

57

The series of battles that ensued were no less awesome than the
fighting between the gods and the Titans, for the Snake-God Ty-
phon was equipped with wings and could fly about just as Zeus
(Fig. 14). ‘‘Zeus thundered hard and mightily, and the earth
around resounded terribly, as did the wide heaven above and the
sea and the watery streams , even the nether parts of the Earth .” Di-
vine Weapons were again employed — by both combatants:

Fig. 14

Through the two of them,
through the thunder and lightning,
heat engulfed the dark-blue seas;

And through the fire from the Monster,
and the scorching winds and blazing Thunderbolt,
the whole Earth seethed, and sky and sea.

Great waves raged along the beaches . . .

And there arose an endless shaking.

In the Lower World, “Flades trembled where he ruled”;
tremble did the Titans imprisoned at the ends of earth. Chasing
each other in the skies and over land, Zeus managed to be the
first to achieve a direct hit with his ‘‘lurid Thunderbolt.” The
bolt ‘‘burned all the marvelous heads of the monster, all that
were around him”; and Typhoeus crashed down to earth in his
marvelous contraption:

58 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

When Zeus had vanquished him
and lashed him with his strokes,

Typhoeus was hurled down a maimed wreck.

The huge earth groaned.

A flame shot forth from the stricken lord
in the dim, rugged, secluded valley of the Mount,
when he was smitten.

A great part of hugfe earth was scorched
by the terrible vapor,

melting as tin melts when heated by man’s art . . .

In the glow of a blazing fire
did the earth melt down.

In spite of the crash and the tremendous impact of Typhon’s ve-
hicle, the god himself remained alive. According to the Theogony,
Zeus cast him, too, “into wide Tartarus.” With this victory his
reign was secure; and he turned to the important business of pro-
creation, bringing forth progeny by wives and concubines alike.

Though the Theogony described only one battle between Zeus
and Typhon, the other Greek writings assert that that was the final
battle, preceded by several others in which Zeus was the first one
to be hurt. Initally Zeus fought with Typhon at close quarters,
using the special sickle his mother had given him for the “evil
deed,” for it was his purpose also to castrate Typhon. But Typhon
enmeshed Zeus in his net, wrested his sickle away, and with it cut
out the sinews of Zeus' hands and feet. He then deposited the help-
less Zeus, his sinews, and his weapons in a cave.

But the gods Aegipan and Hermes found the cave, resurrected
Zeus by restoring his sinews, and returned his weapons to him.
Zeus then escaped and flew back “in a Winged Chariot” to Olym-
pus, where he acquired a new supply of bolts for his Thunderer.
With these Zeus renewed the attack on Typhon, driving him to
Mount Nyssa, where the Fates tricked Typhon into eating the food
of mortal men; whereupon he was weakened instead of being
strengthened. The renewed fighting began in the skies over Mount
Haemus in Thrace, continued over Mount Etna in Sicily, and
ended over Mount Casius on the Asiatic coast of the eastern
Mediterranean. There Zeus, using his Thunderbolt, shot Typhon
down from the skies.

The similarity between the battles, the weapons used, the loca-
tions, as well as the tales of castration, mutilation, and resurrec-
tion-all in the course of a struggle for succession— convinced

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra

59

Herodotus (and other Greek classical historians) that the Greeks
had borrowed their theogony from the Egyptians. Aegipan stood
for the African Ram God of Egypt, and Hermes paralleled the god
Thoth. Hesiod himself reported that when Zeus came unto the mor-
tal beauty Alcmena so that she might bear him the heroic
Heracles, he slipped at night from Mount Olympus and went to the
land of Typhaonion, resting there atop the Phikion (The Sphinx
Mountain). “The deadly Sphinx that destroyed the Cadmeans”
(“The Ancients”), which featured in the doings of Hera, the offi-
cial spouse of Zeus, was also connected in these legends with Ty-
phon and his domain. And Apollodorus reported that when
Typhon was bom and grew to an incredible size, the gods rushed to
Egypt to take a look at the awesome monster.

Most scholars have held that Mount Casius, the site of the final
battle between Zeus and Typhon, was located near the mouth of
the Orontes river in today’s Syria. But as Otto Eissfeldt has shown
in a major study (Baal Zaphon, Zeus Kasios und der Durchgang
der Israeliten durches Meer), there was another mount called by
that name in antiquity— a promontory on the Serbonic Sealet that
juts out of the Sinai peninsula into the Mediterranean Sea. He sug-
gested that that was the mount referred to in the legends.

Once again, all one had to do was to trust the information given
to Herodotus in Egypt. Describing the land route from Phoenicia to
Egypt via Philistia ( History , Book III, 5), he wrote that the Asian
lands “extend to Lake Serbonis, near the place where Mount Casius
juts out into the sea. Egypt begins at Lake Serbonis, where the tale
goes that Typhon hid himself.”

Once again, Greek and Egyptian tales converged, with the Sinai
peninsula as the climax.

Notwithstanding the many connecting threads the ancient Greeks
had found between their theogony and that of Egypt, it was much
farther away— in India— that nineteenth-century European scholars
have found even more amazing parallels.

No sooner had Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, been
mastered at the end of the eighteenth century than Europe began to
be enchanted by translations of hitherto unknown writings. At first
a field dominated by the British, the study of Sanskrit literature,
philosophy, and mythology was by the mid-nineteenth century a
favorite of German scholars, poets, and intellectuals, for Sanskrit
turned out to be a mother tongue of the Indo-European languages
(to which German belonged), and its bearers to India were mi-

60

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

grants from the shores of the Caspian Sea— “Aryans,” as the Ger-
mans believed their ancestors, too, to have been.

Central to this literature were the Vedas, sacred scriptures be-
lieved by Hindu tradition to be “not of human origin,” having
been composed by the gods themselves in a previous age. They
were brought to the Indian subcontinent by the Aryan migrants
sometime in the second millennium b.c., as oral traditions. But as
time went on, more and more of the original 100,000 verses were
lost; so, circa 200 b.c., a sage wrote down the remaining verses,
dividing them into four parts: the Rig-Veda (the “Veda of
Verses”), which is made up of ten books; the Sama-Veda (the
“Chanted Vedas”); the Yajur-Veda (mostly sacrificial prayers); and
the Atharva-Veda (spells and incantations).

In time, the various components of the Vedas and the auxiliaty
literature that stemmed from them (the Mantras, Brahmanas,
Aranyakas, Upanishads) were augmented by the non-Vedic Pura-
nas (“Ancient Writings”). Together with the great epic tales of the
Mahabharata and the Ramayana, they make up the sources of the
Aryan and Hindu tales of Heaven and Earth, gods and heroes.

Because of the long oral interval, the length and profusion of
texts finally written down over many centuries, the many names,
generic terms, and epithets employed for the deities interchange-
ably— and the fact that many of these original names and terms
were non-Aiyan after all— consistency and precision are not hall-
marks of this Sanskrit literature. Yet some facts and events emerge
as basic tenets of the Aryan-Hindu legacy.

In the beginning, these sources relate, there were only the celes-
tial bodies, The Primeval Ones Who Flow.” There was an up-
heaval in the heavens, and “The Dragon” was split in two by the
“Flowing One of Storms.” Calling the two parts by names of non-
Aryan origin, the tales assert that Rehu, the upper part of the de-
stroyed planet, unceasingly traverses the heavens in search of
vengeance; the lower part, Ketu (“The Cut-off One”), has joined
the “Primeval Ones” in their “flowing” (orbits). Many Ages then
passed, and a dynasty of Gods of Heaven and Earth made its ap-
pearance. The heavenly Mar-Ishi, who headed them, had seven (or
ten) children by his consort Prit-Hivi (“The Broad One”), who
personified the Earth. One of them, Kas-Yapa (“He of the
Throne”), made himself chief of the Devas (“The Shiny Ones”),
seizing the title Dyaus-Pitar (“Sky Father”)— the undoubted
source of the Greek title-name Zeus (“Dyaus”) and its Roman
parallel Jupiter (“Dyauspiter”).

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra

61

Quite prolific, Kasyapa begot many gods, giants, and monstrous
offspring by diverse wives and concubines. Most prominent, and
individually known and revered since Vedic times, were the
Adityas— some bom to Kasyapa by his consort Aditi (“Bound-
less”)- Numbering seven at first, they were Vishnu, Varuna, Mi-
tra, Rudra, Pushan, Tvashtri, and Indra. Then the Aditis were
joined by Agni, a son of Kasyapa either by his spouse Aditi or (as

some texts suggest) by his own mother Prithivi. As in the Greek
Olympian circle, the number of the Aditis finally rose to twelve.
Among them were Bhaga, who is believed by scholars to have be-
come the supreme Slavic god Bogh. The last one to be bom by
Aditi— though whether he was fathered by Kasyapa was uncer-
tain — was Surya.

Tvashtri (“Fashioner”), in his role as “All-Accomplishing,”
the artisan of the gods, provided them with aerial cars and magical
weapons. From a blazing celestial metal he fashioned a discus for
Vishnu, a trident for Rudra, a “fire weapon” for Agni, a “bolt-
hurling Thunderer” for Indra, and a “flying mace” for Surya. In
ancient Hindu depictions, all these weapons appeared as hand-held
missiles of diverse shapes (Fig. 15). In addition, the gods acquired
other weapons from Tvashtri's assistants; Indra, for example, ob-

tained an “aerial net” with which he could snare his foes during
sky battles.

62

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The celestial chariots or “aerial cars” were invariably described
as bright and radiant, made of or plated with gold. Indra’s Vimana
(aerial car) had lights shining at its sides and moved “swifter than
thought,” traversing rapidly vast distances. Its unseen steeds were
“Sun-eyed,” emitting a reddish hue, but also changing colors. In
other instances the aerial cars of the gods were described as
multitiered; sometimes they could not only fly in the air, but also
travel under water. In the epic tale of the Mahabharata, the arrival
of the gods for a wedding feast in a fleet of aerial cars is described
thus (we follow the translation of R. Dutt in Mahabharata, The
Epic of Ancient India) :

The gods, in cloud-bome chariots,
came to view the scene so fair:

Bright Adityas in their splendor,

Maruts in the moving air;

Winged Supamas, scaly Nagas,

Deva Rishies pure and high.

For their music famed, Gandharvas;

(and) fair Apsaras of the sky. . . .

Bright celestial cars in concourse
sailed upon the cloudless sky.

The texts also speak of the Ashvins (“Drivers”), gods who spe-
cialized in piloting aerial chariots. “Swift as young falcons,” they
were “the best of charioteers who reach the heavens,” always pi-
loting their craft in pairs, accompanied by a navigator. Their vehi-
cles, which sometimes appeared in groups, were golden-made,
“bright and radiant . . . with easy seat and lightly rolling.” They
were constructed on a triple principle, having three levels, three
seats, three supporting poles, and three rotating wheels. “That
chariot of yours,” Hymn 22 of Book VIII of the Rig-Veda said in
praise of the Ashvins, “hath a triple seat and reins of gold— the
famous car that traverses Heaven and Earth.” The rotating wheels,
it appears, served diverse functions: one to raise the craft, another
to give it direction, the third to speed it along: “One of your chari-
ot’s wheels is moving swiftly around; one speeds for you its on-
ward course.”

As in the Greek tales, so did the gods of the Vedas display little
morality or restraint in sexual matters — sometimes getting away
with it, sometimes not, as when the indignant Adityas selected
Rudra (“The Three-Eyed”) to kill their grandfather Dyaus for

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra

63

having violated their sister Ushas. (Dyaus, wounded, saved his life
by fleeing to a distant celestial body.) Also as in the Greek tales, so
did the gods according to Hindu lore mingle, in later times, in the
loves and wars of mortal kings and heroes. In these instances the
aerial vehicles of the gods played roles even greater than their
weapons. Thus, when one hero drowned, the Ashvins appeared in
a fleet of three aerial chariots, “self-activated watertight ships
which traverse the air,” dived into the ocean, retrieved the hero
from the watery depths, and “conveyed him over land, beyond the
liquid ocean.” And then there was the tale of Yayati, a king who
married the daughter of a god. When the couple bore children, the
happy grandfather gave the king “a highly effulgent golden celes-
tial chariot, which could go everywhere without interruption.”
Without losing time, “Yayati ascended the chariot and, irrepress-
ible in battle, within six nights conquered the entire Earth.”

As in the Iliad, so did Hindu traditions tell of wars of men and
gods over beautiful heroines. Best known of these tales is the Ra-
rnayana, the long epic tale of Rama the prince whose beautiful wife
was abducted by the king of Lanka (the island of Ceylon, off In-
dia). Among the gods who turned out to help Rama was Hanuman,
the god with a monkey face, who conducted aerial battles with the
winged Garuda (Fig. 16), one of the monstrous offspring of

4&tt ummf

64

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Kasyapa. In another instance, Sukra, a god “sullied by immoral-
ity,” abducted Tara, the beautiful wife of Indra’s charioteer.
“The Illustrious Rudra” and other gods then came to the aid of the
aggrieved husband. There ensued “a terrible battle, destructive of
gods and demons, on account of Tara.” In spite of their awesome
weapons, the gods were bested and had to seek refuge with “the
Prime Deity.” Thereupon the grandfather of the gods himself
came to Earth, and put an end to the fighting by returning Tara to
her husband. Then Tara gave birth to a son “whose beauty over-
clouded the celestials .... Filled with suspicion, the gods de-
manded to know who the true father was: the lawful husband or the
abductor-god.” She proclaimed that the boy was the son of Soma,
“Celestial Immortality”; and she named him Budah.

But all that was in times yet to come; in the olden days the gods
battled among themselves for more important causes: supremacy
and rule over the Earth and its resources. With so many offspring
of Kasyapa by diverse wives and concubines, as well as the de-
scendants of the other olden gods, conflict soon became inevitable.
The dominance of the Adityas was especially resented by the Asu-
ras, elder gods whose mothers bore them to Kasyapa before the
Adityas were bom. Bearing a non-Aryan name of a clear Near
Eastern origin (being akin to names of the supreme gods of As-
syria, Babylon, and Egypt — Ashur, Asar, Osiris ), they eventually
assumed in the Hindu traditions the role of the evil gods, the “de-
mons.”

Jealousy, rivaliy , and other causes of friction Finally led to war
when the Earth, “which at first produced food without cultiva-
tion,” succumbed to a global famine. The gods, the texts reveal,
sustained their immortality by drinking Soma, an ambrosiac that
was brought down to Earth from the Celestial Abode by an eagle
and was drunk mixed with milk. The “kine” (“cow-cattle”) of the
gods also provided the gods’ favored “sacrifices” of roasted meat.
But a time came when all these necessities became scarcer and
scarcer. The Satapatha Brahmana describes the events that fol-
lowed:

The gods and the Asuras, both sprung from the Father of
Gods and Men, were contending for superiority. The gods van-
quished the Asuras; yet afterwards, these once more harassed
them. . . .

The gods and the Asuras, both of them sprung from the Father
of Gods and Men, were [again] contending for superiority. This

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra 65

time, the gods were worsted. And the Asuras thought: “To us
alone assuredly belongs this world!”

They thereupon said: “Well, then, let us divide this world be-
tween ourselves; and having divided it, let us subsist thereon.”
Accordingly, they set about dividing it from west to east.

Hearing this, the defeated Adityas went to plead for a share in
Earth’s resources:

When they heard this, the gods said: “The Asuras are actually
dividing this Earth! Come, let us go where the Asuras are divid-
ing it; for what would become of us if we were to get no share of
Earth?”

Placing Vishnu at their head, they went to the Asuras.

Haughtily the Asuras offered to give the Adityas only as much of
Earth as Vishnu could lie upon. ... But the gods used a subter-
fuge and placed Vishnu in an “enclosure” that could “walk in
three directions,” thereby regaining three of the Earth's four re-
gions.

The outsmarted Asuras then attacked from the south; and the
gods asked Agni “how they could vanquish the Asuras forever.”
Agni suggested a pincer maneuver: while the gods attack from
their regions, “I will go round to the northern side, and you will
shut them in from here; and whilst shutting them in, we will put
them down.” Having so vanquished the Asuras, the Satapatha
Brahmana records, “the gods were anxious as to how they might
replenish the sacrifices”; accordingly, many of the battle segments
of the ancient Hindu writings deal with the recapture of the kine
and the resupply of the Soma beverage.

These wars were fought on land, in the air, and beneath the seas.
The Asuras, according to the Mahabharata, made for themselves
three metal fortresses in the skies, from which they attacked the
three regions of the Earth. Their allies in the war with the gods
could become invisible and used invisible weapons; and others
fought from a city beneath the sea, which they had captured from
the gods.

One who excelled in these battles was Indra (“Storm”). On land
he smote ninety-nine strongholds of the Asuras, killing great num-
bers of their armed followers. In the skies he fought from his aerial
car the Asuras, who were hiding in their “cloud fortresses.”

66

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Hymns in the Rig-Veda list groups of gods as well as individual de-
ities defeated by Indra (we follow the translation by R. T. Griffith,
The Hymns of the Rig-Veda ):

Thou slewest with thy bolt the Sasyu . . .

Far from the floor of Heaven in all directions,
the ancient riteless ones fled to destruction . . .

The Dasyu thou hast burned from the heavens.

They met in fight the army of the blameless,
then the Navagvas put forth all their power.

Like emasculates contending with men they fled,
by steep paths from Indra they scattered.

Indra broke through Ilibsa’s strong castles,
and Sushna with his hom he cut to pieces . . .

Thou slewest thy fighting foe with thy Thunder . . .

Fierce on his enemies fell Indra’s weapon,
with his sharp rushing Thunderbolt
he rent their towns to pieces.

Thou goest forth from fight to fight intrepidly,
destroying castle after castle with thy strength.

Thou Indra, with thy friend who makes the foe bow down,
slowest from far away the guileful Namuchi.

Thou hast struck down in death Karanja, Pamaya . . .

Thou hast destroyed the hundred towns of Vangrida.

The ridges of the lofty heaven thou madest shake
when thou, daring, by thyself smote Sambara.

Defeating the gods’ enemies in groups as well as in single com-
bat, and making them “flee to destruction,” Indra turned his ef-
forts to the freeing of the kine. The “demons” hid them inside a
mountain, guarded by Vala (“Encircler”); Indra, aided by the
Angirases, young gods who could emit divine flames, smashed
into the fortified hideaway and freed the kine. (Some scholars, as
J. Herbert in Hindu Mythology, hold that what Indra released or re-
trieved was a Divine Ray, not cows, for the Sanskrit word go has
both meanings.)

When these wars of the gods began, the Adityas named Agni
(“Agile”) as Hotri, their “Chief of Office.” As the wars pro-

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra

67

gressed— some texts suggest for well over a thousand years—
Vishnu (“Active”) was made the Chief. But when the fighting was
over, Indra, having contributed so much to the victory, claimed the
supremacy. As in the Greek Theogony, one of his first acts to es-
tablish his claim was to slay his own father. The Rig-Veda (Book
iv: 18, 12) asks Indra rhetorically: “Indra, who made thy mothera
widow?” The answer follows also as a question: “What god was
present in the fray, when thou didst slay thy father, seizing him by
the foot?”

For this crime Indra was excluded by the gods from the drinking
of the Soma, thereby endangering his continued immortality. They
“ascended up to Heaven,” leaving Indra with the kine he had re-
trieved. But “he went up after them, with the raised Thunder-
weapon,” ascending from the northern place of the gods. Fearing
his weapon, the gods shouted: “Do not hurl!” and agreed to let In-
dra share once again in the divine nourishments.

Indra’s seizing of the leadership of the gods, however, did not
go unchallenged. The challenge came from Tvashtri, to whom
oblique references are made in the Hymns as “the Firstborn” — a fact
that may explain his own claim to the succession. Indra smote him
quickly with the Thunder-Weapon, the very weapon that Tvashtri
had fashioned for him. But then the struggle was taken over by
Vritra (“The Obstructor”), whom some texts call the firstborn of
Tvashtri but whom some scholars interpret as having been an artifi-
cial monster, because he quickly grew to an immense size. At first
Indra was bested, and he fled to a far comer of Earth. When all the
gods then abandoned him, only the twenty-one Maruts stood by his
side. They were a group of gods who manned the fastest aerial
cars, who “loud roaring as the winds make the mountains rock and
reel” as they “lift themselves aloft”:

These verily wondrous, red of hue,

Speed on their course with a roar
over the ridges of the sky . . .

And spread themselves with beams of light . . .

Bright, celestial, with lightning in their hands
and helmets of gold upon their heads.

With the aid of the Maruts, Indra returned to battle Vritra. The
hymns which describe the fight in glowing terms have been trans-
lated by J. Muir (Original Sanskirt Texts) into rhyming poetic
verses:

68

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The valiant god his car ascends.

Swept by his fervid bounding speeds.

Athwart the sky the hero speeds.

The Marut-hosts his escort form.

Impetuous spirits of the storm.

On flashing lightning-cars they ride.

And gleam in warlike pomp and pride . . .

Like lions’ roar their voice of doom;

With iron force their teeth consume.

The hills, the earth itself, they shake;

All creatures at their coming quake.

While earth quaked and all creatures ran for cover, only Vritra,
the foe, calmly watched their approach:

Perched on a steep aerial height
Shone Vritra’s stately fortress bright.

Upon the wall, in martial mood,

The bold gigantic demon stood.

Confiding in his magic arts,

And armed with store of fiery darts.

“Without alarm, defying the might of Indra’s arm,” unafraid of
“the terrors of the deadly flight” rushing toward him, Vritra stood
in wait.

And then was seen a dreadful sight.

When god and demon met in fight.

His sharpened missiles Vritra shot.

His thunderbolts and lightnings hot
he hurled as thick as rain.

The god his fiercest rage defied;

His blunted weapons glanced aside,
at Indra launched in vain.

When Vritra spent all his fiery missiles, Indra was able to take
over the offensive:

The lightnings then began to flash,

The direful thunderbolts to crash,
by Indra proudly hurled.

The Missiles of Zeus and Indra

69

The gods themselves with awe were stilled
And stood aghast; and terror filled
the universal world. . . .

The Thunderbolts hurled by Indra, “forged by the master hand
of Tvashtri” of divine iron, were complex, blazing missiles:

Who the arrowy shower could stand.

Discharged by Indra’s red right hand—

The thunderbolts with hundred joints,

The iron shafts with thousand points.

Which blaze and hiss athwart the sky,

Swift to their mark unerring fly,

And lay the proudest foeman low.

With sudden and resistless blow.

Whose very sound can put to flight
The fools who dare the Thunderer’s might.

Unerringly the guided missiles hit their target:

And soon the knell of Vritra’s doom
Was sounded by the clang and boom
of Indra’s iron shower;

Pierced, cloven, crushed, with horrid yell
The dying demon headlong fell
down from his cloud-built tower.

Fallen to the ground “as trunks of trees that axe had felled,”
Vritra lay prostrate; but though “footless and handless, still he
challenged Indra.” Then Indra gave him the coup-de-grace, and
“smote him with his bolt between the shoulders.”

Indra’s victory was complete; but as Fate would have it, the
fruits of victory were not his alone. As he was claiming the throne
of Kasyapa, his father, old doubts surfaced concerning his true par-
enthood. It was a fact that upon his birth his mother had hid him
from Kasyapa’ s wrath. Why? Was there truth to the rumors that his
true father was his own elder brother, Tvashtri?

The Vedas lift the veil of mystery only partly. They tell, how-
ever, that Indra, great god that he was, did not rule alone: he had to
share powers with Agni and Surya his brothers — just as Zeus had to
share dominions with his brothers Hades and Poseidon.

i

4

THE EARTH CHRONICLES

As if the similarities of the genealogies and warfare between the
Greek and Hindu gods were not enough, tablets discovered in the
Hittite royal archives (at a site nowadays called Boghazkoi) con-
tained more tales of the same story: how, as one generation waned
unto the other, one god fought another for supremacy.

The longest texts discovered dealt, as could be expected, with
the Hittite supreme deity Teshub: his genealogy; his rightful as-
sumption of dominion over Earth’s upper regions; and the battles
launched against him by the god KUMARBI and his offspring.
As in the Greek and Egyptian tales, the Avenger of Kumarbi was
hidden with the aid of allied gods until he grew up somewhere in a
“dark-hued” part of Earth. The final battles raged in the skies
and in the seas; in one battle Teshub was supported by seventy
gods riding in their chariots. At first defeated and either hiding or
exiled, Teshub finally faced his challenger in god-to-god combat.
Armed with the “Thunder-stormer which scatters the rocks for
ninety furlongs” and “the Lightning which flashes frightfully,”
he ascended skyward in his chariot, pulled by two gold-plated
Bulls of Heaven, and “from the skies he set his face” toward his
enemy. Though the fragmented tablets lack the tale’s ending, it is
evident that Teshub was finally victorious.

Who were these ancient gods, who fought each other for su-
premacy and sought dominion over Earth by pitting nation against
nation?

Fittingly, perhaps, treaties that had ended some of the very wars
launched by men for their gods provide important clues.

When the Egyptians and the Hittites made peace after more than
two centuries of warfare, it was sealed by the marriage of the daughter
of the Hittite king Hattusilish III to the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II.
The Pharaoh recorded the event on commemorative stelae which he
placed at Kamak, at Elephantine near Aswan, and at Abu Simbel.

Describing the journey and the arrival of the princess in Egypt,
the inscription relates that when “His Majesty saw that she was as
beautiful of face as a goddess,” he at once fell in love with her and

70

The Earth Chronicles

71

deemed her to be “something lovely granted him by the god Ptah”
and a sign of Hittite acknowledgment of his “victory.” What all
this diplomatic maneuvering had entailed was clarified by other
parts of the inscription: thirteen years earlier, Hattusilish had sent
to the Pharaoh the text of a Peace Treaty; but Ramses II, still
brooding over his near-fatal experience in the battle of Kadesh, ig-
nored it. “The great Chief of Hatti then wrote appeasingly to His
Majesty year after year; but the King Ramses paid no attention.”
Finally, the King of Hatti, instead of sending messages inscribed
on tablets, “sent his eldest daughter, preceded by precious tribute”
and accompanied by Hittite nobles. Wondering what all these gifts
meant, Ramses sent an Egyptian escort to meet and accompany the
Hittites. And, as related above, he succumbed to the beauty of the
Hittite princess, made her a queen, and named her Maat-Neferu-Ra
(“The Beauty Which Ra Sees”).

Our knowledge of history and antiquity has also profited by that
love at first sight, for the Pharaoh then accepted the lingering Peace
Treaty, and proceeded to inscribe it, too, at Kamak, not far from
where the tale of the Battle of Kadesh and the Tale of the Beautiful
Hittite Princess had been commemorated. Two copies, one almost
complete, the other fragmentary, have been discovered, deciphered,
and translated by Egyptologists. As a result we not only have the full
text of the Treaty but also know that the Hittite king wrote down the
treaty in the Akkadian language, which was then (as French was a
century and two ago) the common language of international relations.

To the Pharaoh he sent a copy of the Akkadian original written
on a silver tablet, which the Egyptian inscription at Kamak de-
scribed thus:

What is in the middle of the tablet of silver, on the front side:

Figures consisting of an image of Seth, embracing an image
of the Great Prince of Hatti, surrounded by a border with the
words “the seal of Seth, ruler of the sky; the seal of the regula-
tion which Hattusilish made” . . .

What is within that which surrounds the image of the seal of
Seth on the other side:

Figures consisting of a female image of the goddess of Hatti
embracing a female image of the Princess of Hatti, surrounded
by a border with the words “the seal of the Ra of the town of
Arinna, the lord of the land” . . .

What is within the [frame] surrounding the figures: the seal of
Ra of Arinna, the lord of every land.

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

In the royal Hittite archives, archaeologists have in fact discov-
ered royal seals depicting the chief Hittite deity embracing the Hit-
tite king (Fig. 17), exactly as described in the Egyptian record,
even including the inscription surrounding the border of the seal.
Against all odds, the original treaty itself, inscribed on two tablets
in the Akkadian language, was also found in these archives. But
the Hittite texts called their chief deity Teshub, not “Seth of
Hatti.” Since Teshub meant “Windy Storm,” and Seth (to judge
by his Greek name Typhon) meant “Fierce Wind,” it appeared
that the Egyptians and Hittites were matching their pantheons ac-
cording to the epithet-names of their gods. In line with that,
Teshub’s spouse HEBAT was called “Lady of the Skies” to paral-
lel the goddess by that title in the Egyptian version of the treaty; Ra
(“The Bright One”) was paralleled by a Hittite “Lord of the Sky”
whom the Akkadian version called SHAM ASH (“The Bright
One”), and so on.

The Egyptians and the Hittites, it became evident, were match-
ing separate, but parallel, pantheons; and scholars began to wonder
what other ancient treaties would reveal. One that provided surpris-

The Earth Chronicles

73

ing information was the treaty made circa 1350 b.c. between the
Hittite king Shuppilulima and Mattiwaza, king of the Hurrian king-
dom of Mitanni, which was situated on the Euphrates river midway
between the Land of the Hittites and the ancient lands of Sumer and
Akkad.

Executed as usual in two copies, the treaty’s original was depos-
ited in the shrine of the god Teshub in the Hurrian city Kahat— a
place and a tablet lost in the sands of time. But the duplicate tablet,
deposited in the Hittite holy city of Arinna “in front of the goddess
of the Rising Disc,” was discovered by archaeologists some 3,300
years after it was written!

As did all treaties in those days, the one between the Hittite
and Mitannian kings ended with a call upon “the gods of|he con-
tracting parties to be present, to listen and to serve as witnesses,”
so that adherence to the treaty shall bring divine bliss, and its viola-
tion the wrath of the gods. These “gods of the contracting parties”
were then listed, beginning with Teshub and his consort Hebat as
the supreme reigning gods of both kingdoms, the gods “who regu-
late kingship and queenship” in Hatti and Mitanni and in whose
shrines the copies of the treaty were deposited. Then, a number of
younger deities, both male and female, offspring of the two
reigning gods, were listed by the provincial capitals where they
acted as governing deities, representing their parents.

Here, then, was a listing of the very same gods in the very same hi-
erarchical positions; unlike the Egyptian instance, when different
pantheons were being matched. As other discovered texts proved, the
Hittite pantheon was in fact borrowed from (or through) the Hurrians.
But this particular treaty held a special surprise: toward the end of the
tablet, among the divine witnesses, there were also listed Mitra-ash,
Uruwana, Indar, and the Nashatiyanu gods— the very Mitra, Varuna,
India, and the Nasatya gods of the Hindu pantheon!

Which of the three— Hittite, Hindu, Hurrian— was then the com-
mon source? The answer was provided in the same Hittite-
Mitannian treaty: none of them; for those so-called “Aryan” gods
were listed in the treaty together with their parents and grandpar-
ents, the “Olden Gods”: the couples Anu and Antu, Enlil and his
spouse Ninlil, Ea and his wife Damkina; as well as “the divine
Sin, lord of the oath . . . Nergal of Kutha ... the warrior god
Ninurta ... the warlike Ishtar.”

These are familiar names; they had been invoked in earlier days
by Sargon of Akkad, who had claimed that he was “Overseer of
Ishtar, anointed priest of Anu, great righteous shepherd of Enlil.”

74

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

His grandson Naram-Sin (“Whom the god Sin loves”) could at-
tack the Cedar Mountain when the god Nergal “opened the path”
for him. Hammurabi of Babylon marched against other lands “on
the command of Anu, with Enlil advancing in front of the army.”
The Assyrian king Tiglat-Pileser went conquering on the command
of Anu, Adad, and Ninurta; Shalmaneser fought with weapons
provided by Nergal; Esarhaddon was accompanied by Ishtaron his
march to Nineveh.

No less illuminating was the discovery that the Hittites and the
Hurrians, though they pronounced the deities’ names in their own
language, wrote the names employing Sumerian script; even the
“divine” determinative used was the Sumerian DIN.GIR, literally
meaning “The Righteous Ones” (DIN) “Of ^e Rocketship”
(GIR). Thus the name of Teshub was written DIN. GIR IM (“Di-
vine Stormer”), which was the Sumerian name for the god ishkur,
also known as Adad; or it was written DIN.GIR U, meaning “The
god 10,” which was the numerical rank of Ishkur/ Adad— that of
Anu being the highest (60), that of Enlil 50, that of Ea 40, and so
on down the line. Also, like the Sumerian Ishkur/Adad, Teshub
was depicted by the Hittites brandishing his lightning-emitting
weapon, a “Weapon of Brilliance” (Fig. 18).

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75

By the time the Hittites and their writings were reclaimed from
oblivion, scholars had already determined that before the Hittite
and Egyptian civilizations, before Assyria and Babylon, even be-
fore Akkad, there arose in southern Mesopotamia the high civiliza-
tion of Sumer. All the others were offshoots of that first-known
civilization.

And it is by now established beyond doubt that it was in Sumer
that the tales of gods and men were first recorded. It was there that
numerous texts — more numerous than can be imagined, more de-
tailed than could be expected— were first inscribed. It was there
that the written records of history and prehistory on our planet
Earth had originated. We call them the earth chronicles.

The discovery and understanding of the ancient civilizations has
been a process of continuous astonishment, of incredible realiza-
tions. The monuments of antiquity— pyramids, ziggurats, vast
platforms, columned ruins, carved stones— would have remained
enigmas, mute evidence to bygone events, were it not for the Writ-
ten Word. Were it not for that, the ancient monuments would have
remained puzzles: their age uncertain; their creators obscure; their
purpose unclear.

We owe what we know to the ancient scribes— a prolific and me-
ticulous lot, who used monuments, artifacts, foundation stones,
bricks, utensils, weapons of any conceivable material, as inviting
slates on which to write down names and record events. Above all
there were the clay tablets: flattened pieces of wet clay, some small
enough to be held in the palm of the hand, on which the scribe
deftly embossed with a stylus the symbols that formed syllables,
words, and sentences. Then the tablet would be left to dry (or be
kiln-dried), and a permanent record had been created— a record
that has survived millennia of natural erosion and human destruc-
tiveness.

In place after place— in centers of commerce or of administra-
tion, in temples and palaces, in all parts of the ancient Near East —
there were both state and private archives full of such tablets; and
there were also actual libraries where the tablets, tens of thousands
of them, were neatly arranged by subject, their contents entitled,
their scribe named, their sequel numbered. Invariably, whenever
they dealt with history or science or the gods, they were identified
as copies of earlier tablets, tablets in the “olden language.”

Astounded as the archaeologists were to uncover the grandeur of
Assyria and Babylonia, they were even more puzzled to read in

7$ THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

their inscriptions of “olden cities.” And what was the meaning of
the title “king of Sumer and Akkad” that the kings of these em-
pires coveted so much?

It was only with the discovery of the records concerning Sargon
of Agade that modem scholars were able to convince themselves
that a great kingdom, the Kingdom of Akkad, had indeed arisen in
Mesopotamia half a millennium before Assyria and Babylonia were
to flourish. It was with the greatest amazement that scholars read in
these records that Sargon “defeated Uruk and tore down its
wall. . . . Sargon, king of Agade, was victorious over the inhab-
itants of Ur. ... He defeated E-Nimmar and tore down its wall
and defeated its territory from Lagash as far as the sea. His weap-
ons he washed in the sea. In the battle with the inhabitants of
Umma he was victorious. . . .”

The scholars were incredulous: Could there have been urban
centers, walled cities, even before Sargon of Agade, even before
2500 b.c.?

As is now known, indeed there were. These were the cities and
urban centers of Sumer, the “Sumer” in the title “king of Sumer
and Akkad. ’ ’ It was, as a century of archaeological discoveries and
scholarly research has established, the land where Civilization
began nearly six thousand years ago; where suddenly and inexpli-
cably, as though out of nowhere, there appeared a written language
and literature; kings and priests; schools and temples; doctors and
astronomers; high-rise buildings, canals, docks, and ships; an in-
tensive agriculture; an advanced metallurgy; a textile industry;
trade and commerce; laws and concepts of justice and morality;
cosmological theories; and tales and records of history and prehis-
tory.

In all these writings, be it long epic tales or two-line proverbs,
in inscriptions mundane or divine, the same facts emerge as an
unshakable tenet of the Sumerians and the peoples that followed
them: in bygone days, the DIN.GIR— “The Righteous Ones of the
Rocketships,” the beings the Greeks began to call “gods”— had
come to Earth from their own planet. They chose southern Meso-
potamia to be their home away from home. They called the land
KI.EN.GIR— “Land of the Lord of the Rockets” (the Akkadian
name, Shumer, meant “Land of the Guardians”); and they estab-
lished there the first settlements on Earth.

The statement that the first to establish settlements on Earth
were astronauts from another planet was not lightly made by the
Sumerians. In text after text, whenever the starting point was re-

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77

called, it was always this: 432,000 years before the Deluge, the
DIN.GIR (“Righteous Ones of the Rocketships”) came down to
Earth from their own planet. The Sumerians considered it a twelfth
member of our Solar System— a system made up of the Sun in the
center, the Moon, all the nine planets we know of today, and one
more large planet whose orbit lasts a Sar, 3, $00 Earth-years. This
orbit, they wrote, takes the planet to a “station” in the distant
heavens, then brings it back to Earth’s vicinity, crossing between
Mars and Jupiter. It was in that position— as depicted in a
4,500-year-old Sumerian drawing (Fig. 19) that the planet ob-
tained its name NIBIRU (“Crossing”) and its symbol, the Cross.

The leader of the astronauts who had come to Earth from Nibiru,
we know from numerous ancient texts, was called E. A (“Whose
House Is Water”); after he had landed and established Eridu, the
first Earth Station, he assumed the title EN.KI (“Lord of Earth”).
A text that was discovered in the mins of Sumer records his landing
on Earth as a first-person report:

When I approached Earth
there was much flooding.

When I approached its green meadows,

heaps and mounds were piled up at my command.

I built my house in a pure place . . .

My house— its shade stretches over the Snake Marsh.

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The text then proceeds to describe Ea’s efforts to build extraor-
dinary waterworks in the marshlands at the head of the Persian
Gulf: He surveyed the marshlands, cut canals for drainage and
water control, built dykes, dug ditches, and built structures of
bricks molded from the local clays. He joined the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers by canals; and at the edge of the marshlands he
built his Water House, with a wharf and other facilities.

It all had a reason. On his planet gold was needed. Not for jew-
elry or another frivolous use, for at no time during the millennia that
followed were these visitors to Earth ever shown wearing golden
jewelry. Gold was, no doubt, required for the space programs of
the Nibiruans, as is evident from the Hindu texts’ references to the
celestial chariots being covered with gold; indeed, gold is vital to
many aspects of the space instruments and vehicles of our own
times. But that alone could not have been the reason for the inten-
sity of the Nibiruans’ search for gold on Earth and their immense
efforts to obtain it here and transfer it in large quantities to their
own planet. The metal, with its unique properties, was needed
back home for a vital need, affecting the very survival of life on
that planet; as best as we can make out, this vital need could have
been for suspending the gold particles in Nibiru’s waning atmo-
sphere and thus shield it from critical dissipation.

A son of Nibiru’s ruler, Ea was well chosen for the mission.
He was a brilliant scientist and engineer whose nickname was
NU. DIM. MUD, “He Who Fashions Things.” The plan, as his
epithet-name E.A. indicated, was to extract the gold from the
waters of the quiet Persian Gulf and the adjoining shallow marsh-
lands that extended from the gulf into Mesopotamia. Sumerian de-
pictions showed Ea as lord of the flowing waters, sitting in a
laboratory and surrounded by interconnected flasks (Fig. 20).

But the unfolding tale suggests that all was not going well with
this scheme. The gold production was far below expectations, and
to speed it up, more astronauts— the rank and fde were called
Anunnaki (“Those Who From Heaven to Earth Came”)— landed on
Earth. They came in groups of fifty, and one of the texts reveals
that one of these groups was led by Enki’s firstborn son
MAR.DUK. The text records Marduk’s urgent message to his fa-
ther describing a near-calamity on the flight to Earth, as the space-
ship passed by one of the Solar System’s large planets (probably
Jupiter) and almost collided with one of that planet’s satellites. De-
scribing the “attack” on the spacecraft, the excited Marduk told
his father:

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79

It has been created like a weapon;

It has charged forward like death . . .

The Anunnaki who are fifty it has smitten . . .

The flying, birdlike Supreme Orbiter

it has smitten on the breast.

A Sumerian engraving on a cylinder seal (Fig. 21) may well
have illustrated the scene of Lord Earth (on the left) anxiously
greeting his son, dressed as an astronaut (on the right), as the
spaceship leaves Mars (the six-pointed star) and nears Earth (the
seventh planet when counting from the outside in, symbolized by
the seven dots and depicted together with the Moon).

Back on the home planet, where Enki’s father AN (Anu in Akka-
dian) was the ruler, the progress of the landing parties was fol-
lowed with anxiety and expectation. These must have turned to im-
patience at the slow progress, and then to disappointment.
Evidently the scheme to extract gold from seawaters by
laboratorylike processes did not work as expected.

But the gold was still badly needed; and the Anunnaki faced a

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

tough decision: to abandon the project— which was out of the
question — or to try to obtain the gold in a new way: mining. For
gold, the Anunnaki knew by then, was naturally available in abun-
dance in the AB.ZU (“The Primeval Source”) on the continent of
Africa. (In the Semitic languages that had evolved from the Sume-
rian, Za-ab — Abzu in reverse— has remained the word for gold to
this very day).

There was, however, one major problem. The African gold
had to be extracted from the depths of the earth through mining;
and the far-reaching decision to change from the sophisticated
water-treatment process to a backbreaking toil below the sur-
face of the earth was not lightly taken. Clearly the new enter-
prise required more Anunnaki, a mining colony in “the place of
the shining lodes,” expanded facilities in Mesopotamia, and a
fleet of ore vessels (MA.GUR UR.NU AB.ZU— “Ships for
Ores of the Abzu”) to connect the two. Could Enki handle it all
by himself?

Anu felt that he could not; and eight Nibiru years after Enki’s
landing— 28,800 Earth-years— he came to Earth to see things for
himself. He came down accompanied by the Heir Apparent
EN.LIL ( Lord of the Command”) — a son who, Anu must have
felt, could take charge of Earth mission and organize the gold de-
liveries to Nibiru.

The choice of Enlil for the mission might have been a necessary
one, but it must have been an agonizing one as well; for it only
sharpened the rivalry and jealousy between the two half-brothers.
For Enki was the firstborn son of Anu by Id, one of his six concu-
bines, and could have expected to follow Anu on Nibiru’s throne.

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81

But then— as in the biblical tale of Abraham, his concubine Hagar,
and his half-sister wife Sarah— Anu’s half-sister wife Antum bore
him a son, Enlil. And by the Nibiruan rules of succession— so
faithfully adopted by the biblical patriarch— Enlil became the legal
heir instead of Enki. And now this rival, this robber of Enki’s
birthright, came to Earth to take over the command!

One cannot stress enough the importance of lineage and geneal-
ogy in the Wars of the Gods; the struggles for succession and su-
premacy, on Nibiru as on Earth later on.

Indeed, as we unravel the puzzling persistence and ferocity of
the wars of the gods, trying to fit them into the framework of his-
tory and prehistory— a task never undertaken before— it becomes
clear that they stemmed from a code of sexual behavior based not
on morality but on considerations of genetic purity. At the core of
these wars lay an intricate genealogy that determined hierarchy and
succession; and sexual acts were judged not by their tenderness or
violence but by their purpose and outcome.

There is a Sumerian tale of how Enlil, commander-in-chief of
the Anunnaki, took a fancy to a young nurse whom he saw swim-
ming naked in the river. He persuaded her to go sailing with him
and made love to her against her protestations (“my vulva is small,
it knows not intercourse”). In spite of his rank Enlil was arrested by
the “fifty senior gods” as he returned to his city Nippur and was
found by “the seven Anunnaki who judge” to have committed the
crime of rape; they sentenced him to exile in the Abzu. (He was
pardoned only when he married the young goddess, who had fol-
lowed him into exile.)

Many songs celebrated the love affair between Inanna and a
young god named Dumuzi, in which their “sleep-outs” were de-
scribed with touching tenderness:

O that they put his hand in my hand for me.

O that they put his heart next to my heart for me.

Not only is it sweet to sleep hand in hand with him.

Sweetest of sweet is also the loveliness

of joining heart to heart with him.

We can understand the approving tone of the verse because
Dumuzi was the intended bridegroom of Inanna, chosen by her
with the approval of her brother Utu/Shamash. But how to explain
a text in which Inanna describes passionate lovemaking with her
own brother?

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

My beloved met me,

took his pleasure of me, rejoiced together with me.

The brother brought me to his house,
made me lie on its sweet bed . . .

In unison, the tongue-making in unison,
my brother of fairest face
made fifty times.

This can only be understood if we bear in mind that the code pro-
hibited marriage, but not lovemaking, between full brother and sis-
ter. On the other hand, marriage with a half-sister was allowed;
male progeny by a half-sister even had precedence in the hierar-
chical order. And while rape was condemned, sex— even irregular
and violent was condoned it done for the sake of succession to the
throne. A long tale relates how Enki, seeking a male son by his
(and Enlil s) half-sister Sud, forced his attentions on her when she
was alone and “poured the semen in the womb.” When she gave
birth to a daughter (rather than to a son), Enki lost no time making
love to the girl as soon as she became “young and fair ... He
took his joy of her, he embraced her, lay in her lap; he touches the
thighs, he touches the . . . with the young one he cohabits.” This
went on unabashedly with a succession of young daughters, until
Sud put a curse on Enki, which paralyzed him; only then did these
sexual antics in search of a male heir stop.

When Enki engaged in these sexual efforts, he was already es-
poused to Ninki, which illustrates that the same code which con-
demned rape did not prohibit extramarital affairs per se. We also
know that the gods were allowed any number of wives and concu-
bines (a text catalogued as CT-24 listed six of Anu’s concubines),
but, if married, they had to select one as their official spouse-
preferring, as we have mentioned, a half-sister for this role.

If the god, apart from his given name and many epithets, was
also bestowed with a title-name, his official consort was also’ hon-
ored with the feminine form of such title. Thus when AN received
his title-name (“The Heavenly”), his consort was called ANTU,
Anu and Antum in Akkadian. The nurse who had married Enlil
(“Lord of Command”) received the title-name Ninlil (“Lady of
Command”); Enki’s spouse Damkina was called Ninki, and so on.

Because of the importance of the family relationships between
these great Anunnaki, many so-called God Lists prepared by an-
cient scribes were genealogical in nature. In one such major list,
titled by the ancient scribes the “AN : ilu Anum ” series, there are

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83

listed the “forty-two foreparents of Enlil,” clearly arranged as
twenty-one divine couples. This must have been a mark of great
royal lineage, for two similar documents for Anu also list his
twenty-one ancestral couples on Nibiru. We learn that the parents
of Anu were AN.SHAR.GAL (“Great Prince of Heaven”) and
KI.SHAR.GAL (“Great Princess of Firm Ground”). As their
names indicate, they were not the reigning couple on Nibiru:
rather, the father was the Great Prince, meaning the heir apparent;
and his spouse was a great princess, the firstborn daughter of the
ruler (by a different wife) and thus a half-sister of Anshargal.

In these genealogical facts lies the key to the understanding of
the events on Nibiru before the landing on Earth, and on Earth
thereafter.

Sending Ea to Earth for gold implies that the Nibiruans had al-
ready been aware of the metal’s availability on Earth well before
the landing was launched. How?

One could offer several answers: They could have probed Earth
with unmanned satellites, as we have been doing to other planets in
our Solar System. They could have surveyed Earth by landing on
it, as we have done on our Moon. Indeed, their landing on Mars
cannot be ruled out as we read texts dealing with the space voyages
from Nibiru to Earth.

Whether and when such manned premeditated landings on Earth
had taken place, we do not know. But there does exist an ancient
chronicle dealing with an earlier landing in dramatic circum-
stances: when the deposed ruler of Nibiru escaped to Earth in his
spacecraft!

The event must have happened before Ea was sent to Earth by
his father, for it was through that event that Anu became Nibiru’s
ruler. Indeed the event was the usurpation of the throne on Nibiru
by Anu.

The information is contained in a text whose Hittite version has
been titled by scholars Kingship in Heaven. It throws light on life at
the royal court of Nibiru and tells a tale of betrayal and usurpation
worthy of a Shakespearean plot. It reveals that when the time for
succession arrived on Nibiru— through natural death or other-
wise— it was not Anshargal, Anu’s father and the heir apparent,
who had ascended the throne. Instead a relative named Alalu
(Alalush in the Hittite text) became the ruler.

As a gesture of reconciliation or by custom, Alalu appointed
Anu to be his royal cup-bearer, an honored and trusted position

84

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

also known to us from several Near Eastern texts and royal depic-
tions (Fig. 22). But after nine Nibiruan years, Anu (Anush in the
Hittite text) “gave battle to Alalu” and deposed him:

Fig. 22

Once in the olden days, Alalush was king in Heaven.

Alalush was seated on the throne;

The mighty Anush, first among the gods,
was standing before him:

He would bow to his feet,
set the drinking cup in his hand.

For nine counted periods, Alalush was king in Heaven.

In the ninth counted period,

Anush gave battle to Alalush.

It was then, the ancient text tells us, that the dramatic flight to
Earth had occurred:

Alalush was defeated, he fled before Anush-
Down he descended to the dark-hued Earth.

Anush took his seat upon the throne.

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85

While it is quite possible that much about Earth and its resources
may have been known on Nibiru even before Alalu’s flight, the
fact is that we do have in this tale a record of the arrival on Earth of
a spaceship bearing Nibiruans before Ea’s mission to Earth. The
Sumerian King Lists report that the first administrator of Eridu was
called Alulim— a name that could have been yet another epithet for
Ea/Enki, or the Sumerian rendering of Alalu’s name; the possibil-
ity thus comes to mind that, though deposed, Alalu was suffi-
ciently concerned about Nibiru’s fate to advise his deposer that he
had found gold in Earth’s waters. That this is indeed what had hap-
pened might be indicated by the fact that a reconciliation between
deposed and deposer did ensue; for Anu went ahead and appointed
Kumarbi, a grandson of Alalu, to be his royal cup-bearer.

But the gesture of reconciliation only caused history on Nibiru to
repeat itself. In spite of all the bestowed honors, the young Kum-
arbi could not forget that Anu had usurped the throne from his
grandfather; and as time went on, Kumarbi’s enmity toward Anu
was becoming more and more obvious, and Anu “could not with-
stand the gaze of Kumarbi’s eyes.”

And so it was that, having decided to leave Nibiru for Earth and
even take the Heir Apparent (Enlil) with him, Anu deemed it safer
also to take along the young Kumarbi. Both decisions— to take En-
lil with him and to take Kumarbi along— ended up making the visit
one marred by strife and— for Anu— also filled with personal ag-
ony.

The decision to bring Enlil to Earth and put him in charge led to
heated arguments with Enki— arguments echoed in the texts so far
discovered. The angry Enki threatened to leave Earth and return to
Nibiru; but could he be trusted not to usurp the throne there? If, as
a compromise, Anu himself were to stay on Earth, appointing Enlil
as surrogate ruler on Nibiru, could Enlil be trusted to step down
when Anu returned? Finally it was decided to draw lots: let chance
determine how it shall be. The division of authority that ensued is
repeatedly mentioned in Sumerian and Akkadian texts. One of the
longest of the Earth Chronicles, a text called The Atra-Hasis Epic,
records the drawing of lots and its outcome:

The gods clasped hands together,

then cast lots and divided:

Anu to heaven went up;

To Enlil the Earth was made subject;

That which the sea as a loop encloses.

I

8$ THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

they gave to the prince Enid.

To the Abzu Enki went down,

assumed the rulership of the Abzu.

Believing that he had managed to separate the rival brothers,
“Anu to Heaven went up. ” But in the skies above Earth, an unex-
pected turn of events awaited him. Perhaps as a precaution, Kum-
arbi was left on the space platform orbiting Earth; when Anu
returned to it, ready to take off on the long voyage back to Nibiru,
he was confronted by an angry Kumarbi. Harsh words soon gave
way to a scuffle: “Anu gave battle to Kumarbi, Kumarbi gave bat-
tle to Anu.” As Kumarbi bested Anu in the wrestling, “Anu strug-
gled free from the hands of Kumarbi.” But Kumarbi managed to
grab Anu by his feet, and “bit between his knees,” hurting Anu in
his “manhood.” Ancient depictions were found of the event (Fig.
23a), as well as of the habit of wrestling Anunnaki (Fig. 23b) to
hurt one another in the genitals.

Fig. 23

Disgraced and in pain, Anu took off on his way to Nibiru, leav-
ing Kumarbi behind with the astronauts manning the space plat-
forms and shuttlecraft. But before he departed, he put on Kumarbi

I a curse of “three monsters in his belly.”

The similarity of this Hittite tale to the Greek tale of the castra-
tion of Uranus by Cronos, and the swallowing by Cronos of his

The Earth Chronicles 87

sons, needs no elaboration. And, as in the Greek tales, this episode
set the stage for the wars between the gods and the Titans.

After Anu had left. Earth Mission was launched in earnest.

As more Anunnaki landed on Earth— their number rose in time
to 600 — some were assigned to the Lower World to help Enki mine
the gold; others manned the ore ships; and the rest stayed with En-
lil in Mesopotamia. There, additional settlements were established
in accordance with a master plan laid out by Enlil, as part of a com-
plete organizational plan of action and clear-cut procedures:

He perfected the procedures, the divine ordinances;

Established five cities in perfect places,

Called them by name,

Laid them out as centers.

The first of these cities, Eridu,

He granted to Nudimmud, the pioneer.

Each of these pre-Diluvial settlements in Mesopotamia had a
specific function, revealed by its name. First was E.RI.DU—
“House in Faraway Built”— the gold-extracting facility by the
waters’ edge, which for all time remained Ea’s Mesopotamian
abode. Next came BAD.TIBIRA — “Bright Place Where the Ores
Are Made Final”— the metallurgical center for smelting and refin-
ing. Next LA. RA.AK— “Seeing the Bright Glow”— was a
beacon-city to guide the landing shuttlecraft. SIPPAR— “Bird
City” — was the Landing Place; and SHU.RUP.PAK— “The Place
of Utmost Well-Being”— was equipped as a medical center; it was
put in the charge of SUD (“She Who Resuscitates”), a half-sister
of both Enki and Enlil.

Another beacon-city, LA.AR.SA (“Seeing the Red Light”), was
also built, for the complex operation depended on close coordina-
tion between the Anunnaki who had landed on Earth and 300 as-
tronauts, called IGI.GI (“Those Who See and Observe”), who
remained in constant Earth orbit. Acting as intermediaries between
Earth and Nibiru, the Igigi stayed in Earth’s skies on orbiting plat-
forms, to which the processed ores were delivered from Earth by
shuttlecraft, thereafter to be transferred to proper spaceships,
which could ferry the gold to the Home Planet as it periodically
neared Earth in its vast elliptical orbit. Astronauts and equipment
were delivered to Earth by the same stages, in reverse.

All of that required a Mission Control Center, which Enlil pro-

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88 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

ceeded to build and equip. It was named NIBRU.KI (“The Earth-
Place of Nibiru’’)— Nippur in Akkadian. There, atop an artificially
raised platform equipped with antennas— the prototype of the Mes-
opotamian “Towers of Babel” (Fig. 24)— was a secret chamber,
the DIR.GA (“Dark, Glowing Chamber”) where space charts
(“the emblems of the stars”) were displayed and where the
DUR.AN.KI (“Bond Heaven-Earth”) was maintained.

Fig. 24

The Chronicles have asserted that the first settlements of the An-
unnaki on Earth were “laid out as centers.” To this enigmatic
statement was added the puzzle of the claim by post-Diluvial
kings that in reestablishing in Sumer the cities wiped out by the
Flood, they had followed

The everlasting ground plan,

that which for all time

the construction has determined.

It is the one which bears

the drawings from the Olden Times

and the writing of the Upper Heaven.

The puzzle will be solved if we mark out those first cities estab-
lished by Enki and Enlil on the region’s map and connect them
with concentric circles. They were indeed “laid out as centers”:
all were equidistant from the Mission Control Center in Nippur. It
was indeed a plan “from Upper Heaven,” for it made sense only to
those who could view the whole Near East from high above Earth:
Choosing the twin-peaked Mount Ararat— the area’s most conspic-

The Earth Chronicles

89

uous feature— as their landmark, they placed the spaceport where
the north line based on Ararat crossed the visible Euphrates River.
In this “everlasting ground plan,” all the cities were arranged as
an arrow, marking out the Landing Path to the Spaceport at Sippar
(Fig. 25).

The periodic deliveries of gold to Nibiru mitigated the concerns,

90 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

even the rivalries, on that planet, for Anu stayed on as its ruler fora
long time thereafter. But on Earth all the main actors were present
on the “dark-hued” stage to give vent to eveiy imaginable emotion
and to incredible conflicts.

5

THE WARS OF
THE OLDEN GODS

Anu’s first visit to Earth and the decisions then reached set the
course of events on Earth for all the millennia that followed. In
time they led to the creation of The Adam — Man as we know him.
Homo sapiens; they also planted the seeds of future conflict on
Earth between Enlil and Enki and their descendants.

But first there were the lingering and bitter struggles between the
House of Anu and the House of Alalu, an enmity that burst out on
Earth into the War of the Titans. It was a war that pitted “the gods
who are in heaven” against the “gods who are upon dark-hued
Earth”; it was, in its last climactic phase, an uprising of the Igigi!

That it had taken place in the early days of the settlement of the
Nibiruans on Earth and in the aftermath of Anu’s first visit to
Earth, we know from the Kingship in Heaven text. Recalling the
adversaries, it refers to them as “the mighty olden gods, the gods
of the olden days.” After naming five ancestors as “the fathers and
mothers of the gods” who preceded Anu and Alalu, it begins the
tale with the usurpations of the throne on Nibiru, the flight of
Alalu, the visit of Anu to Earth, and the ensuing conflict with
Kumarbi.

The story in the Kingship in Heaven text is augmented and con-
tinued in several other Hittite/Hurrian texts, which scholars call
collectively The Kumarbi Cycle. Laboriously pieced together (and
still badly fragmented), the texts have recently become more intel-
ligible by the discovery of additional fragments and versions, re-
ported and fitted into place by H. Guterbock (Kumarbi Mythen von
Churritischen Kronos) and H. Otten (Mythen vom Gotte Kumar-
bi— Neue Fragmente).

How long Kumarbi remained aloft after the fight with Anu is not
clear from these texts. We do learn that after the passage of some
time, and after Kumarbi managed to spit out the “stones” that Anu
caused to grow in his belly, Kumarbi came down to Earth. For rea-

91

92

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

sons that may have been explained in missing parts of the texts, he
went to Ea in the Abzu.

Mutilated verses then deal with the appearance on the scene of
the Storm God Teshub, who, according to the Sumerians, was En-
lil s youngest son Ishkur/Adad. The Storm God annoys Kumarbi
by telling him of the wonderful attributes and objects that each god
will grant him, Teshub; among these attributes shall be Wisdom,
which shall be transferred away from Kumarbi. “Filled with fuiy
Kumarbi went to Nippur.” Breaks in the texts leave us ignorant as
to what went on there, at Enlil’s headquarters; but after a stay of
seven months Kumarbi went back to consult with Ea.

Ea suggested that Kumarbi “ascend to heaven” and seek the
help of Lama, who was “motherof the two gods” and thus, appar-
ently, an ancestral matriarch of the two contesting dynasties. With
some self-interest, Ea offered to transport Kumarbi to the Celestial
Abode in his MAR.GID.DA (celestial chariot), which the Akka-
dians called Ti-ia-ri-ta, “the flying vehicle.” But the goddess,
having found out that Ea was coming without the permission of the
Assembly of the Gods, sent “lightning winds” against Ea’s space-
craft, forcing him and Kumarbi to return to Earth.

But rather than go down all the way, Kumarbi chose to stay with
the orbiting gods whom the Hittite/Hurrian text calls Irsirra
(“Those Who See and Orbit”), the Sumerian IGI.GI. With ample
time on his hands, “Kumarbi was full with thoughts . . . thinking
them out in his mind ... he nurses thoughts of creating misfor-
tune ... he plots evil.” The essence of his thoughts was that he
should be proclaimed “the father of all the gods,” the supreme de-
ity!

Gaining the backing of the orbiting Irsirra gods, Kumarbi “put
swift shoes on his feet” and flew down to Earth. There he sent his
emissary to the other leading gods, demanding that they recognize
his supremacy.

It was then that Anu decided that enough was enough. To van-
quish once and for all the grandson of his adversary Alalu, Anu or-
dered his own grandson, the “Storm God” Teshub, to find
Kumarbi and kill him. Ferocious battles then ensued between the
terrestrial gods led by Teshub and the sky-borne gods led by Kum-
arbi; in one battle alone, no less than seventy gods participated, all
riding in celestial chariots. Though most battle scenes are lost in
the damaged text, we know that in the end Teshub had prevailed.

But the defeat of Kumarbi did not end the struggle. We learn
from additional Hittite epic tales in the Kumarbi Cycle that before

The Wars of the Olden Gods

93

his demise, Kumarbi managed to impregnate a goddess of the
mountain with his seed, leading to the birth of his Avenger, the
“Stone God” Ullikummi. As he hid his marvelous (or monstrous)
son among the Irsirra gods, he instructed him to grow and attack
Teshub’s “beautiful city Kummiya . . . Attack the Storm God and
tear him to pieces . . . shoot down all the gods from the sky like
birds!” Once he attained victory on Earth, Ullikummi was to “as-
cend to Heaven for Kingship” and seize by force the throne on Ni-
biru. Having issued these instructions, Kumarbi passed away from
the scene.

For a long time the child was hidden. But as he grew up-
assuming giant proportions — he was seen one day by Utu/Shamash
as he was roaming the skies. Utu rushed to Teshub’s abode, to in-
form him of the appearance of the Avenger. After giving Utu food
and drink to becalm himself, Teshub urged him to “mount thy
chariot and ascend to the skies,” to keep an eye on the growing
Ullikummi. Then he went up the Mountain of Viewing to see the
Stone God for himself. “He looked at the awesome Stone God,
and in wrath shook his fist.”

Realizing there was no alternative to battle, Teshub readied his
chariot for combat; the Hittite text calls it by its Sumerian name
ID.DUG.GA, “The Flowing Leaden Rider.” The instructions for
outfitting the celestial chariot, for which the Hittite text heavily
employed the original Sumerian terminology, merit quoting. They
called for revving up the vehicle with the “Great Cracker”; at-
taching the “Bull” (power-plant) that “Lights Up” in front and
the “Bull for Lofty Missile” in the back end; installing the radarlike
or navigational device “That Which Shows The Way” in the fore-
part; activating the instmments with the powerful energy “Stones”
(minerals); and then arming the vehicle with the “Storm Thun-
derer,” loading it with no less than eight hundred “Fire Stones”:

The “Great Cracker” of the “Bright Lead Rider”
let them lubricate with oil and stir up.

The “Bull that Lights Up” let them put between the horns.
The tail’s “Bull that is Lofty Missile”
let them plate with gold.

The forepart’s “That Which Shows The Way”

let them put in and turn,

provide it with powerful “Stones” inside.

Let them bring out the “Storm Thunderer”
which scatters rocks for 90 furlongs.

94

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

making sure the “Fire Stones” with 800 ... to cover.

The “Lightning Which Flashes Frightfully”

let them bring out from its storage chamber.

Let them bring out the MAR.GID.DA and make it ready!

“From the skies, from among the clouds, the Storm God set his
face upon the Stone God.” After the initial unsuccessful attacks,
Ninurta, the brother of Teshub/Adad, joined the battles. But the
Stone God remained unharmed and carried the battle to the very
gates of Kummiya, the Storm God’s city.

In Kummiya, Teshub’s spouse Hebat was following the battle
reports in an inner chamber of the god’s house. But the missiles of
Ullikummi “forced Hebat to leave the house, and she could no
longer hear the messages of the gods . . . neither the messages of
Teshub, nor the messages of all the gods.” She ordered her mes-
senger to “put the Swift Shoes on his feet” and go to the place
where the gods were assembled, to bring back news of the battle;
for she feared that “the Stone God may have killed my husband,
the noble prince.”

But Teshub was not killed. Advised by his attendant to hide at
some mountainous sites, he refused; If we do that, he said, “there
will be no king in Heaven!” The two then decided to go to Ea in
the Abzu, to seek there an oracle according to “the old tablets with
the words of fate.”

Realizing that Kumarbi had brought forth a monster that was
getting out of hand, Ea went to Enlil to warn him of the danger:
“Ullikummi will block off the Heaven and the gods’ holy
houses!” An assembly of the Great Anunnaki was called. With all
at a loss for a solution, Ea had one: From the sealed storehouse of
the “stone cutters,” let them bring out a certain Olden Metal Cut-
ter, and let them cut under the feet of Ullikummi the Stone God.

When this was achieved, the Stone God was crippled. When the
gods heard this, “they came to the place of assembly, and all the
gods began to bellow against Ullikummi.” Teshub, encouraged,
jumped into his chariot; “he caught up with the Stone God
Ullikummi at the sea, and engaged him in battle.” But Ullikummi
was still defiant, declaring: “Kummiya I shall destroy, the Sacred
House I shall take over, the gods I shall drive out . . . up to
Heaven I shall go to assume Kingship!”

The closing lines of the Hittite epic are completely damaged; but
can we doubt that they told us the Sanskrit tale of the final battle
between Indra and the “demon” Vritra?

The Wars of the Olden Gods

95

And then was seen a dreadful sight,
when god and demon met in fight.

His sharpened missiles Vritra shot,
his thunderbolts and lightnings hot . . .

The lightnings then began to flash,
the direful thunderbolts to crash,
by Indra proudly hurled . . .

And soon the knell of Vritra’s doom
was sounded by the clang and boom
of Indra’s iron shower.

Pierced, cloven, crushed, with horrid yell
the dying demon headlong fell . . .

And Indra smote him with a bolt
between the shoulders.

These, we believe, were the battles of the “gods” and the Titans
of the Greek tales. No one has yet found the meaning of “Titans”;
but if the tales had a Sumerian origin, and if so did these gods’
names, then TI.TA.AN in Sumerian would have literally meant
“Those Who in Heaven Live”— precisely the designation of the
Igigi led by Kumarbi; and their adversaries were the Anunnaki
“Who are on Earth.”

Sumerian texts indeed record an olden life-and-death battle be-
tween a grandson of Anu and a “demon” of a different clan; the
tale is known as The Myth ofZu. Its hero is Ninurta, Enlil’s son by
his half-sister Sud; it could well have been the original tale from
which the Hindu and Hittite tales were borrowed.

The setting for the events described in the Sumerian text is the time
that had followed Anu’s visit to Earth. Under the overall command of
Enlil, the Anunnaki have settled to their tasks in the Abzu and in Mes-
opotamia: The ores are mined and transported, then smelted and re-
fined. From a busy spaceport in Sippar, shuttlecraft take the precious
metals aloft to the orbiting stations operated by the Igigi, thence on to
the Home Planet by periodically visiting spaceships.

The complex system of space operations — the comings and
goings by the space vehicles and communications between Earth
and Nibiru, while both planets pursue their own destined orbits— is
coordinated from Enid's Mission Control Center in Nippur. There,
atop a raised platform, was the DIR.GA room, the most restricted
“holy of holies” where the vital celestial charts and orbital data
panels— the “Tablets of Destinies”— were installed.

96 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

It was into this sacred chamber that a god named Zu gained ac-
cess, seizing the vital tablets and thereby holding in his hands the
fate of the Anunnaki on Earth and of Nibiru itself.

By combining portions of Old Babylonian and Assyrian versions of
the Sumerian text, a good deal of the tale has been restored. But dam-
aged portions still held the secret of Zu’s true identity, as well as an
explanation of how he had gained access to the Dirga. Only in 1979
did two scholars (W. W. Hallo and W. L. Moran) come up with the
answer by using a tablet found in the Babylonian Collection of Yale
University to reconstruct the beginning of the ancient tale.

In Sumerian the name ZU meant “He Who Knows,” one expert
in certain knowledge. Several references to the evil hero of this tale
as AN.ZU — “He Who Knows the Heavens” — suggest a connec-
tion with the space program that had linked Earth with Nibiru; and
the now-restored beginning of the chronicle indeed relates how Zu,
an orphan, was adopted by the astronauts who manned the
shuttlecraft and orbiting platforms, the Igigi— learning from them
the secrets of the heavens and of space travel .

The action begins as the Igigi, “being gathered from all parts,”
decided to make an appeal to Enlil. Their complaint was that “until
that time for the Igigi a break-taking place had not yet been built.”
In other words, there simply was no facility on Earth for the rest
and recreation of the Igigi, where they could relax from the rigors
of space and its weightlessness. To voice their complaint they se-
lected Zu to be their spokesman, sending him to Enid's center in
Nippur.

Enlil, “the father of the gods, in the Dur-An-Ki, saw him, and
thought of what they [the Igigi] said.” As “in his mind he pon-
dered” the request, “he studied the heavenly Zu closely.” Who,
after all, was this emissary, not one of the astronauts and yet wear-
ing their uniform? As his suspicions grew, Ea — aware of Zu’s true
ancestry— spoke up; he suggested to Enlil that a decision on the re-
quest of the Igigi could be postponed if Zu were delayed at Enid's
headquarters. “Your service let him enter,” Ea said to Enlil; “in
the sanctuary, to the innermost seat, let him be the one to block the
way.”

To the words that Ea spoke to him

the god [Enlil] consented.

At the sanctuary Zu took up his position . . .

At the entrance to the chamber

Enlil had assigned him.

The Wars of the Olden Gods

97

And so it was, with Ea’s connivance, that an adversary god— a se-
cret descendant of Alalu— was admitted to Enlil’s innermost and most
sensitive chamber. We read that there Zu “constantly views Enlil, the
father of the gods, the god of the Bond-Heaven-Earth ... his celestial
Tablet of Destines Zu constantly views.” And soon a scheme took
shape: “The removal of the Enlilship he conceives in his heart”:

I will take the celestial Tablet of Destinies;

The decrees of the gods I will govern;

I will establish my throne,

be master of the Heavenly Decrees;

The Igigi in their space I will command!

“His heart having thus plotted aggression,” Zu saw his chance one
day as Enlil went to take a cooling swim. “He seized the Tablet of
Destinies in his hands” and in his Bird “took off and flew to safety in
the HUR.SAG.MU” (“Mountain of the Sky -Chambers”). No soon-
er had this happened than everything came to a standstill:

Suspended were the divine formulas;

The lighted brightness petered out;

Silence prevailed.

In space, the Igigi were confounded;

The sanctuary’s brilliance was taken off.

At first “father Enlil was speechless.” As the communications
were restored, “the gods on Earth gathered one by one at the
news.” Anu, on Nibiru, was also informed. It was clear that Zu
must be captured and the Tablet of Destinies restored to the
Dir-Ga. But who will do it? Several of the younger gods known for
their valor were approached. But none dared track Zu to the distant
mountain, for he was now as powerful as Enlil, having also stolen
the “Brilliance” of Enlil; “and he who opposes him shall become
as clay ... at his Brilliance the gods waste away.”

It was then that Ninurta, Enlil’s legal heir, stepped forth to un-
dertake the task, for— as his mother Sud had pointed out— Zu de-
prived not only Enlil but also Ninurta of the “Enlilship.” She
advised him to attack Zu in his hideaway mountain also with a
weapon of “Brilliance,” but to do so only after he was able to ap-
proach Zu behind a dust screen. To achieve the latter she lent
Ninurta her own “seven whirlwinds that stir up the dust.”

With “his battle courage grown firmer,” Ninurta repaired to

98

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Mount Hazzi— the mountain encountered in the Kumarbi tales—
where he hitched to his chariot his seven weapons, attached the
whirlwinds that stir up the dust, and set out against Zu “to launch a
terrifying war, a fierce battle”:

Zu and Ninurta met at the mountainside.

When Zu perceived him, he broke out in rage.

With his Brilliance, he made the mountain

bright as daylight;

He let loose rays in a rage.

Unable to identify his challenger because of the dust storm, Zu
shouted to Ninurta: “I have carried off all Authority, the decrees of
the gods I [now] direct! Who are thou to come fight with me? Ex-
plain thyself!”

But Ninurta continued to “advance aggressively” against Zu,
announcing that he was designated by Anu himself to seize Zu and
restore the Tablet of Destinies. Hearing this, Zu cut off his Bril-
liance, and "the face of the mountain was covered with darkness.”
Unafraid, Ninurta “entered the gloom.” From the “breast” of his
vehicle, he let loose a Lightning at Zu, “but the shot could not ap-
proach Zu; it turned back.” With the powers Zu had obtained, no
lightning bolt could “approach his body.”

So the battle was stilled, the conflict ceased; the weapons were
stopped in the midst of the mountain; they vanquished not Zu.”

Stalemated, Ninurta asked his younger brother Ishkur/Adad to
obtain the advice of Enlil. “Ishkur, the prince, took the report; the
news of the battle he reported to Enlil.”

Enlil instructed Ishkur to go back and tell Ninurta: “In the battle do
not tire; prove thy strength!” More practically, he sent Ninurta a
tillu—a missile (pictographically written to attach to

the Stormer that shoots the projectiles. Ninurta in his “Whirlwind
Bird,” he said, should then come as close as possible to the Bird of
Zu, until they are “wing to wing.” Then he should aim the missile at
the “pinions” of Zu’s Whirlbird, and “let the missile fly like a light-
ning; when the Fiery Brilliance will engulf the pinions, his wings will
vibrate like butterflies; then will Zu be vanquished.”

The final battle scenes are missing from all the tablets, but we
know that more than one “Whirlbird” participated in the combat.
Fragments of duplicates, found in the ruins of a Hittite archive at a
site now called Sultan-Tepe, tell us that Ninurta arrayed “seven
whirlwinds which stir up the dust,” armed his chariot with the

The Wars of the Olden Gods

99

“111 Winds” weapons, and attacked Zu as suggested by his fa-
ther. “The earth shook ... the [illegible] became dark, the skies
became black ... the pinions of Zu were overcome.” Zu was
captured and brought back before Enlil in Nippur; the Tablet of
Destinies was reinstalled where it belonged; “Lordship again en-
tered the Ekur; the Divine Formulas were returned.”

The captured Zu was put on trial before a court-martial consist-
ing of the Seven Great Anunnaki; he was found guilty and sen-
tenced to death; Ninurta, his vanquisher, “cut his throat.” Many
depictions were found showing the trial scene, in which Zu, on ac-
count of his association with the Igigi astronauts, was dressed up as
a bird. An archaic relief found in central Mesopotamia illustrated
the actual execution of Zu. This one shows Zu — who belonged to
those “Who Observe and See”— as a demonic cock with an extra
eye in the forehead (Fig. 26).

* * *

100

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The defeat of Zu lingered in the memory of the Anunnaki as a
great deliverance. Perhaps because of the assumption that the spirit
of Zu— representing betrayal, duplicity, and all evil in general—
persists in causing ill and suffering, the trial and execution of Zu
were transmitted to mankind’s generations in the form of an elabo-
rate ritual. In this annual commemoration a bull was chosen to
stand for Zu and atone for his evil deed.

Long instructions for the ritual have been found in both Babylo-
nian and Assyrian versions, all indicating their earlier Sumerian
source. After extensive preparations, a “great bull, strong bull
who treads upon clean pastures” was brought into the temple and
purified on the first day of a certain month. It was then whispered
into the bull’s left ear through a reed tube: “Bull, the guilty Zu are
you”; and into the right ear: “Bull, you have been chosen for the
rite and the ceremonies.” On the fifteenth day the bull was brought
before the images of “the Seven Gods Who Judge” and the sym-
bols of the twelve celestial bodies of the Solar System.

The trial of Zu was then reenacted. The bull was put down be-
fore Enlil, “the Great Shepherd.” The accusing priest recited rhe-
torical accusational questions, as though addressed to Enlil: How
could you have given “the stored treasure” to the enemy? How
could you have let him come and dwell in the “pure place”?
How could he gain access to your quarters? Then the playacting
called for Ea and other gods to beseech Enlil to calm himself, for
Ninurta had stepped forward and asked his father: “Point my hands
in the right direction! Give me the right words of command!”

Following this recital of the evidence given at the trial , judgment
was passed. As the bull was being slaughtered in accordance with
detailed instructions, the priests recited the bull’s verdict: His liver
was to be boiled in a sacrifical kettle; his skin and muscles were to
be burned inside the temple; but his “evil tongue shall remain out-
side.”

Then the priests, playing the roles of the other gods, broke out in
a hymn of praise to Ninurta:

Wash your hands, wash your hands!

You are now as Enlil, wash your hands!

You are as Enlil [upon] the Earth;

May all the gods rejoice in you!

When the gods looked for a volunteer to fight Zu, they promised
the vanquisher of Zu:

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101

Thy name shall be the greatest
in the Assembly of the Great Gods;

Among the gods, thy brothers,
thou shall have no equal;

Glorified before the gods
and potent shall be thy name!

After Ninurta’s victory the promise had to be kept. But therein
was the rub and the seed of future fights among the gods: Ninurta
was indeed Enlil’s Legal Heir but on Nibiru, not on Earth. Now, as
the commemorative temple ritual makes clear, he was made “as
Enlil— upon Earth.” We know from other texts dealing with the
gods of Sumer and Akkad that their hierarchical order was also ex-
pressed numerically. Anu was given the highest number of the Su-
merian sexagesimal system, 60. His Legal Heir, Enlil, had the
rank of 50; the firstborn son (and heir in the event of Enlil's
demise), Ea, was 40. Now, as the enigmatic statement that Ninurta
has become “as Enlil” attests, he, too, was given the rank of 50.

The partly mutilated ending of the temple ritual text contains the
following legible verses: “O Marduk, for your king speak the
words: ‘I release!’ O Adad, for your king speak the words: ‘I re-
lease!’ ” We can safely guess that the mutilated lines also included
a similar release by Sin of his claim to kingship among the gods
and recognition of Ninurta’s Enlilship. We know that thereafter. Sin
—Enlil’s firstborn on Earth— held the rank of 30, his son Shamash
20, and his daughter Ishtar 15, and Ishkur ( Adad in Akkadian) the
rank of 10. (There is no record of Marduk’s numerical rank.)

The conspiracy of Zu and his evil plotting remained also in man-
kind’s memory, evolving into a fear of birdlike demons who can
cause affliction and pestilence (Fig. 27). Some of these demons
were called Lillu, a term that played on the double meaning “to
howl” and “of the night”; their female leader, Lillitu— Lilith —
was depicted as a naked, winged goddess with birdlike feet (Fig.
28). The many shurpu (“purification by burning”) texts that have
been found were formulas for incantations against these evil
spirits — forerunners of the sorcery and witchcraft that had lasted
throughout the millennia.

In spite of the solemn vows taken after the defeat of Zu to honor
and respect Enlil’s supremacy and Ninurta’s position as second-in-
command, the basic factors causing rivalry and contention had
remained— breaking into the open from time to time in the ensuing

102

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 27

millennia. Realizing that this would be so, Anu and Enlil provided
Ninurta with new, marvelous weapons. Anu gave him the SHAR.UR
(“Supreme Hunter”) and the SHAR.GAZ (“Supreme Smiter”);
Enlil gave him several weapons, of which the unique IB— a
weapon with “fifty killing heads” — was the most awesome, lead-
ing to references in the chronicles to Ninurta as “The Lord of the
lb.” Thus armed, Ninurta became the “Foremost Warrior of En-
lil,” ready to fight off all challenges to the Enlilship.

The next such challenge came in the shape of a mutiny of the
Anunnaki who were working in the gold mines of the Abzu. The
mutiny, and the events that had led to it and followed it, are fully
described in a text called by scholars The Atra-Hasis Epic— a full-
fledged Earth Chronicle which, inter alia, records the events that
had led to the creation of Homo sapiens — Man as we know him.

The text informs us that after Anu had gone back to Nibiru and
Earth was divided between Enlil and Enki, the Anunnaki toiled in
the mines of the Abzu for “forty counted periods”— forty orbits
of their planet, or 144,000 Earth-years. But the work was diffi-

cult and backbreaking: “inside the mountains ... in the deeply
cut shafts ... the Anunnaki suffered the toil; excessive was their
toil, for forty counted periods.”

The mining operations, deep inside the earth, were never inter-
rupted: the Anunnaki “suffered the toil day and night.” But as the

104 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

shafts grew deeper and the toil harsher, dissatisfaction grew:
“They were complaining, backbiting, grumbling in the excava-
tions.”

To help maintain discipline Enlil sent Ninurta to the Abzu, but
this strained relations with Enki even more. It was then that Enlil
decided to go to the Abzu and personally evaluate the situation.
The discontended Anunnaki seized the opportunity to mutiny!

The Atra-Hasis chronicle, in language as vivid as that of a mod-
em reporter, in more than 150 lines of text, unambiguously de-
scribes the events that followed: How the rebellious Anunnaki put
their tools on fire and, in the middle of the night, marched on En-
lil’s dwelling; how some shouted “Let us kill him . . . Let us
break the yoke!”; how an unnamed leader reminded them that En-
lil was the “Chief Officer of Old Time,” and advised negotiations;
and how Enlil, enraged, took up his weapons, but he, too, was re-
minded by his chamberlain: “My lord, these are your sons. . . .”

As Enlil remained a prisoner in his own quarters, he sent a mes-
sage to Anu and asked that he come to Earth. When Anu arrived,
the Great Anunnaki assembled fora court-martial. “Enki, Ruler of
the Abzu, was also present.” Enlil demanded to know who the in-
stigator of the mutiny was, calling for a death penalty. Not getting
the support of Anu, Enlil offered his resignation: “Noble one,” he
said to Anu, “take away the office, take away the power; to
Heaven will I ascend with you.” But Anu, calming Enlil, also ex-
pressed understanding of the miners' hardships.

Encouraged, Enki “opened his mouth and addressed the gods.”
Repeating Anu’s summation, he had a solution to offer: While the
Chief Medical Officer, their sister Sud, was here in the Abzu with
them:

Let her create a Primitive Worker;

And let him bear the yoke . . .

Let the Worker carry the toil of the gods,

Let him bear the yoke!

In the following one hundred lines of the Atra-Hasis text, and in
several other “Creation of Man” texts that have been discovered in
various states of preservation, the tale of the genetic engineering of
Homo sapiens has been told in amazing detail. To achieve the feat
Enki suggested that a “Being that already exists”— Apewoman— be
used to create the Lulu Amelu (“The Mixed Worker”) by “binding”
upon the less evolved beings “the mold of the gods.” The goddess

The Wars of the Olden Gods

105

Sud purified the “essence” of a young male Anunnaki; she mixed it
into the egg of an Apewoman. The fertilized egg was then implanted
in the womb of a female Anunnaki, for the required period of preg-
nancy. When the “mixed creature” was bom, Sud lifted him up and
shouted: “I have created! My hands have made it!”

The “Primitive Worker ” — Homo sapiens — had come into be-
ing. It happened some 300,000 years ago; it came about through a
feat of genetic engineering and embryo-implant techniques which
mankind itself is beginning to employ. There has undoubtedly
been a long process of evolution; but then the Anunnaki had taken
a hand in the process and jumped the gun on evolution, “creating”
us sooner than we might have evolved on our own. Scholars have
been searching fora long time for the “missing link” in man’s ev-
olution. The Sumerian texts reveal that the “missing link” was a
feat of genetic manipulation performed in a laboratory. . . .It was
not a feat over and done with in an instant. The texts make clear
that it had taken the Anunnaki considerable trial and error to
achieve the desired “perfect model” of the Primitive Worker, but
once achieved, a mass-production process was launched: fourteen
“birth goddesses” at a time were implanted with the genetically
manipulated Apewomen eggs: seven to bear male and seven to
bear female Workers. As soon as they grew up, the Workers were
put to work in the mines; and as their numbers grew, they assumed
more and more of the physical chores in the Abzu.

The armed clash between Enlil and Enki that was soon to take
place, however, was over these same slave laborers. . . .

The more the production of ores improved in the Abzu, the
greater was the work load on the Anunnaki that had remained to
operate the facilities in Mesopotamia. The climate was milder,
rains were more plentiful, and the rivers of Mesopotamia were con-
stantly overflowing. Increasingly the Mesopotamian Anunnaki
“were digging the river,” raising dikes and deepening the canals.
Soon they too began to clamor for the slave workers, the “crea-
tures of bright countenance” but with thick black hair:

The Anunnaki stepped up to Enlil . . .

Black-headed Ones they were requesting of him.

To the Black-headed people

to give the pickax to hold.

We read of these events in a text named by Samuel N. Kramer
The Myth of the Pickax. Though portions are missing, it is under-

106

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

stood that Enki refused Enlil’s request for the transfer of Primitive
Workers to Mesopotamia. Deciding to take matters into his own
hands, Enlil took the extreme step of disconnecting the communi-
cations with the home planet: “In the ‘Bond Heaven-Earth’ he
made a gash . . . verily did he speed to disconnect Heaven from
Earth.” Then he launched an armed attack against the Land of the
Mines.

The Anunnaki in the Abzu assembled the Primitive Workers in a
central compound, strengthening its walls against the coming at-
tack. But Enlil fashioned a marvelous weapon, the AL.A.NI (“Ax
That Produces Power”) equipped with a “horn” and an “earth
splitter” that could drill through walls and earthworks. With these
weapons Enlil drove a hole through the fortifications. As the hole
widened “Primitive Workers were breaking out toward Enlil. He
eyed the Black-headed Ones in fascination.”

Thereafter the Primitive Workers performed the manual tasks in
both Lands: In the Land of the Mines they “bore the work and suf-
fered the toil”; in Mesopotamia, “with picks and spades they built
gods’ houses, they built the big canal banks; food they grew for the
sustenance of the gods.”

Many ancient drawings engraved on cylinder seals depicted
these Primitive Workers performing their tasks, naked as the ani-
mals of the field (Fig. 29). Various Sumerian texts recorded this
animallike stage in human development:

Fig. 29

The Wars of the Olden Gods

107

When Mankind was first created.

They knew not the eating of bread,
Knew not the dressing of garments.

Ate plants with their mouth like sheep.
Drank water from the ditch . . .

How long, however, could young female Anunnaki be asked (or
forced) to perform the roles of “birth goddesses”? Unbeknownst
to Enlil, and with the connivance of Sud, Enki contrived to give the
new creature one more genetic twist: granting to the hybrid
beings— incapable of procreating, as all hybrids are— the ability to
have offspring, the sexual “Knowing” for having children. The
event is echoed in the biblical tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden, and although the original Sumerian text of the tale has not
yet been found, a number of Sumerian depictions of the event were
indeed discovered. They show different aspects of the tale: the
Tree of Life; the offering of the forbidden fruit; the angry encoun-
ter that ensued between the “Lord God” and the “Serpent.” Yet
another shows Eve girdled in a garment around her loins while
Adam is still naked (Fig. 30), another detail related in the Bible.

Fig. 30

While the Serpent God features in all these ancient depictions, the
illustration reproduced here is of particular significance as it writes
out, in archaic Sumerian the god’s epithet/name as * — >. The
“star” spells “god” and the triangular symbol reads BUR, BURU,
or BUZUR— all terms that make the epithet/name mean “God
Who Solves Secrets,” “God of the Deep Mines,” and variations
thereof. The Bible (in the original Hebrew) calls the god who

108

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

tempted Eve Nahash, translated “Serpent,” but literally meaning
“He Who Solves Secrets” and “He Who Knows Metals,” the ex-
act parallels of the god’s name in the Sumerian depiction. This de-
piction is of further interest because it shows the Serpent God with
his hands and feet in tethers, suggesting that Enki was arrested af-
ter his unauthorized deed.

In his anger Enlil ordered the expulsion of The Adam— the
Homo sapiens Earthling— from the E.DIN (“The Abode of the
Righteous Ones”). No longer confined to the settlements of the
Anunnaki, Man began to roam the Earth.

“And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore
Cain . . . and she bore again his brother Abel.” The gods
were no longer alone on Earth.

Little did the Anunnaki then know the role that the Primitive
Worker would play in the wars between them.

6

MANKIND EMERGES

Ever since George Smith found and reported in 1876 (The Chal-
dean Account of Genesis) detailed Mesopotamian tales of Cre-
ation, followed by L. W. King’s The Seven Tablets of Creation,
scholars and theologians alike have come to recognize that the Cre-
ation Tales of the Old Testamant (Genesis Chapters 1 through 3)
are condensed and edited versions of original Sumerian texts. A
century later, in our work. The 12th Planet (197$), we have shown
that these texts were no primitive myths, but depositories of ad-
vanced scientific knowledge with which modem scholars are only
now beginning to catch up.

The unmanned space probes of Jupiter and Saturn confirmed
many “incredible” facets of the Sumerian knowledge regarding
our Solar System, such as that the outer planets have numerous sat-
ellites and that water is present on some of them. Those distant
planets, and some of their principal satellites, were found to have
active cores that generate internal heat; some radiate out more heat
than they can ever receive from the distant Sun. Volcanic activity
provided those celestial bodies with their own atmospheres. All the
basic requirements for the development of life exist out there, just
as the Sumerians had said 6,000 years ago.

What, then, of the existence of a twelfth member of our Solar
System— a tenth planet beyond Pluto, the Sumerian Nibiru (and
Babylonian Marduk)— a planet whose existence was a basic and
far-reaching conclusion in The 12th Planet?

In 1978, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Wash-
ington determined that Pluto— being smaller than formerly be-
lieved— could not by itself account for perturbations in the orbits of
Uranus and Neptune; they postulated the existence of yet another
celestial body beyond Pluto. In 1982 the U.S. National Aeronau-
tics and Space Administration (NASA) announced its conclusion
that there indeed exists such a body; whether or not it is another
large planet, it planned to determine by deploying in a certain man-
ner its two Pioneer spacecraft that had been hurtling into space be-
yond Saturn.

109

110 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

And at the close of 1983, astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Lab-
oratory in California announced that IRAS— the infrared telescope
mounted on a spacecraft and launched under NASA’s auspices
with the cooperation of other nations— had discovered beyond
Pluto a very distant “mystery celestial body” about four times the
size of Earth and moving toward Earth. They have not yet called it
a planet; but our Earth Chronicles leave the ultimate finding in no
doubt.

In 1983, rocks were found in Antarctica and elsewhere which
are undoubtedly fragments of the Moon and Mars; and the scien-
tists are totally baffled as to how that could have happened. The
Sumerian tale of the Creation of the Solar System, the collision be-
tween Nibiru’s satellites and Tiamat, and the rest of the cosmogony
in the celebrated Epic of Creation offer a comprehensive explana-
tion.

And what about the texts describing how Man was created
through genetic manipulation: in vitro fertilization and reimplanta-
tion?

Recent advances in genetic sciences and technologies have af-
firmed the Sumerian concept of gradual evolution on the one hand,
and on the other hand, the (otherwise inexplicable) appearance of
the biologically advanced Homo sapiens through genetic engineer-
ing by the Anunnaki. Even the very recent method of test tube
procreation— extracting a female egg, impregnating it with purified
male semen, and reimplanting the fertilized egg in a woman’s
womb— is the very same procedure described in the Sumerian texts
from millennia ago.

If the two principal events— the creation of Earth and the cre-
ation of Man— are correctly reported in the Bible, ought we not to
accept the veracity of the biblical tale regarding the emergence of
mankind on Earth?

And if the biblical tales are but a condensed version of more de-
tailed, earlier Sumerian chronicles, could not the latter be used to
enhance and complete the biblical record of those earliest times?

Since one is the reflection of the other, let us hold up a mirror to
that ancient flame of memories. . . . Let us continue the unrav-
eling of the wondrous tale.

After relating how “77;e Adam” (literally, “the Earthling”)
was granted the ability to procreate, the Book of Genesis moves
from recounting the general events on Earth to the saga of a spe-
cific branch of mankind: the person named Adam and his descen-
dants.

Mankind Emerges 111

“This is the Book of the Generations of Adam,” the Old Testa-
ment informs us. Such a book, we can safely assume, had surely
existed. The evidence strongly suggests that the person whom the
Bible called Adam was the one whom the Sumerians called Adapa,
an Earthling “perfected” by Enki and deemed to have been genet-
ically related to him. “Wide understanding Enki perfected for him,
to disclose the designs of the Earth; to him he gave Knowing; but
immortality he did not give him.”

Portions of the “Tale of Adapa” have been found; the complete
text might well have been the “Book of the Generations of Adam”
to which the Old Testament refers. Assyrian kings probably had
access to such a record, for many of them claimed to have retained
one or another of Adapa’s virtues. Sargon and Sennacherib held
that they had inherited the wisdom that Enki had granted Adapa;
Sinsharishkun and Esarhaddon boasted that they were bom “in the
image of the wise Adapa”; according to an inscription of
Esarhaddon, he had erected in the temple of Ashur a statue with the
image of Adapa; and Ashurbanipal asserted that he had learned
“the secret of tablet-writing from before the Deluge” as Adapa
had known.

The Sumerian sources hold that there had been both rural
cultures— cultivation and shepherding— as well as urban settle-
ments before the Deluge had swept all off the face of the Earth.
The Book of Genesis relates that the first son of Adam and Eve,
Cain, “was a tiller of the earth,” and his brother Abel “was a
herder of sheep.” Then, after Cain was exiled “away from the
presence of the Lord” for having killed Abel, urban settlements —
Cities of Man— were established: in the land of Nud, east of Eden,
Cain had a son whom he named Enoch and built a city called like-
wise, the name meaning “Foundation.” The Old Testament, hav-
ing no particular interest in the line of Cain, skips quickly to the
fourth generation after Enoch, when Lamech was bom:

And Lamech took unto himself two wives:

The name of one was Adah,

and the name of the other Zillah.

And Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of
such as dwell in tents and have cattle.

And his brother’s name was Jubal; he was the
father of all such as play lyre and pipe.

And Zillah also bore Tubal-Cain,
an artificer of gold and copper and iron.

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The pseudepigraphical Book of Jubilees, believed to have been
composed in the second century b.c. from earlier material, adds the in-
formation that Cain espoused his own sister Awan and she bore him
Enoch “at the close of the fourth Jubilee. And in the first year of the
first week of the fifth Jubilee, houses were built on the earth, and Cain
built a city and called its name Foundation, after the name of his son. ”
Where did this additional information come from?

It has long been held that this part of the Genesis tale stands
alone, without corroboration or parallel in the Mesopotamian texts.
But we have found that it is just not so.

First, we have come upon a Babylonian tablet in the British Mu-
seum (No. 74329, Fig. 31), catalogued as “containing an other-
wise unknown myth.” Yet it may in fact be a Babylonian/Assyrian
version from circa 2000 b.c. of a missing Sumerian record of the
Line of Cain!

As copied by A. R. Millard and translated by W. G. Lambert
(Kadmos, vol. VI), it speaks of the beginnings of a group of people
who were ploughmen, which corresponds to the biblical “tiller of
the land.” They are called Amakandu— “People Who In Sorrow
Roam”; it parallels the condemnation of Cain: “Banned be thou
from the soil which hath received thy brother’s blood ... a rest-
less nomad shalt thou be upon the earth.” And, most remarkably,
the Mesopotamian chief of these exiled people was called Ka ’in!
Also, just as in the biblical tale:

He built in Dunnu

a city with twin towers.

Ka’in dedicated to himself

the lordship over the city.

The name of this place is intriguing. Because the order of sylla-
bles could be reversed in Sumerian without changing the meaning,
the name could also be spelled NU.DUN, paralleling the biblical
name Nud as the place of Cain’s exile. The Sumerian name meant
“the excavated resting place”— very much similar to the biblical
interpretation of the name as meaning “Foundation.”

After the death (or murder) of Ka’in, “he was laid to rest in the
city of Dunnu, which he loved.” As in the biblical tale, the Meso-
potamian text records the history of four following generations:
brothers married their sisters and murdered their parents, taking
over the rulership in Dunnu as well as settling in new places, the
last of which was named Shupat (“Judgment”).

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

A second source indicating Mesopotamian chronicles for the
biblical tale of Adam and his son Cain are Assyrian texts. We find,
for example, that an archaic Assyrian King List states that in the
earliest times, when their forefathers were tent-dwellers— a term
duplicated in the Bible regarding the line of Cain— the patriarch of
their people was named Adamu, the biblical Adam.

We also find among traditional Assyrian eponyms of royal
names the combination Ashur-bel-Ka’ini (“Ashur, lord of the Ka’-
inites”); and the Assyrian scribes paralleled this with the Sumerian
ASHUR-EN.DUNI (“Ashur is lord of Duni ”), implying that the
Ka’ini (“The people of Kain”) and the Duni (“The people of
Dun”) were one and the same; and thus reaffirming the biblical
Cain and Land of Nud or Dun.

Having dealt briefly with the line of Cain, the Old Testament
turned its full attention to a new line descended of Adam: “And
Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son, and called his name
Seth, for [she said] the Lord hath granted me another offspring in-
stead of Abel, whom Cain had slain.” The Book of Genesis then
adds: “One hundred and thirty years did Adam live when he begot
a son in his likeness and after his image, and called his name Seth.

“And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight
hundred years, and he begot [other] sons and daughters; and all the
days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he
died. And Seth lived a hundred and five years and begot Enosh;
and after he begot Enosh Seth lived eight hundred and seven years,
and he begot [other] sons and daughters; and all the days of Seth
were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.”

The name of Seth’s son and the next pre-Diluvial patriarch in
which the Bible was interested was Enosh; it has come to mean in
Hebrew “Human, Mortal,” and it is clear that the Old Testament
considered him the progenitor of the human lineage at the core of
the ancient chronicles. It states in respect to him, that "It was then
that the name of Yahweh began to be called,” that worship and
priesthood began.

There are a number of Sumerian texts that shed more light on
this intriguing aspect. The available portions of the Adapa text
state that he was “perfected” and treated as a son by Enki in
Enki’s city Eridu. It is likely then, as William Hallo (Antediluvian
Cities ) had suggested, that the great-grandson of Enosh was named
Yared to mean “He of Eridu.” Here, then, is the answer: While
the Bible loses interest in the banished descendants of Adam, it fo-

Mankind Emerges 115

cuses its attention on the patriarchs from Adam’s line who had
stayed in Eden— southern Mesopotamia— and were the first to be
called to priesthood.

In the fourth generation after Enosh the firstborn son was named
Enoch; scholars believe that here the name’s meaning stemmed
from a variant of the Hebrew root, connoting “to train, to edu-
cate.” Of him the Old Testament briefly states that he “had
walked with the Deity” and did not die on Earth, “for the Deity
had taken him.” The sole verse in Genesis 5:24 is substantially en-
larged upon in the extra-biblical Books of Enoch. They detail his
first visit with the Angels of God to be instructed in various sci-
ences and ethics. Then, after returning to Earth to pass the knowl-
edge and the requisites of priesthood to his sons, he was taken aloft
once more, to permanently join the Nefilim (the biblical term
meaning “Those Who Had Dropped Down”) in their celestial
abode.

The Sumerian King List records the priestly reign of Enmedu-
ranki in Sippar, then the location of the Spaceport under the com-
mand of Utu/Shamash. His name, “Priestly lord of the Dur-an-ki,”
indicates that he had been trained in Nippur. A little-known tablet,
reported by W. G. Lambert (“Enmeduranki and Related Mate-
rial”), reads as follows:

Enmeduranki [was] a prince in Sippar,

Beloved of Anu, Enlil and Ea.

Shamash in the Bright Temple appointed him.

Shamash and Adad [took him] to the assembly [of the gods] . . .

They showed him how to observe oil on water,

a secret of Anu, Enlil and Ea.

They gave him the Divine Tablet,

the kibdu secret of Heaven and Earth . . .

They taught him how to make calculations with numbers.

When the instruction of Enmeduranki in the secret knowledge of
the gods was accomplished, he was returned to Sumer. The “men
of Nippur, Sippar and Babylon were called into his presence.” He
informed them of his experiences and of the establishment of
priesthood. It shall be passed, the gods commanded, from father to
son: “The learned savant, who guards the secrets of the gods, will
bind his favored son with an oath before Shamash and Adad . . .
and will instruct him in the secrets of the gods.”

The tablet concludes with a postscript: “Thus was the line of

116 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

priests created— those who are allowed to approach Shamash and
Adad.”

By the time of the seventh generation after Enosh, on the eve
of the Deluge, the Earth and its inhabitants were gripped by a
new Ice Age. The Mesopotamian texts detail the sufferings by
mankind, the shortages of food, even cannibalism. The Book of
Genesis only hints at the situation by stating that when Noah
(“Respite”) was born, he was so named by his father in the
hope that his birth shall signal a respite “from the work and toil
that cometh from the Earth which the Lord hath cursed.” The
biblical version tells us little about Noah, apart from the fact
that he was “righteous and of pure genealogy.” The Mesopo-
tamian texts inform us that the hero of the Deluge lived in
Shuruppak, the medical center run by Sud.

The Sumerian texts relate that as mankind’s hardships were in-
creasing, Enki suggested, and Enlil vehemently opposed, the tak-
ing of measures to alleviate the suffering. What upset Enlil no end
was the increasing sexual relationships between the young male
Anunnaki and the Daughters of Man. The Book of Genesis de-
scribes the “taking of wives” by the Nefilim in the following
words:

And it came to pass,

When the Earthlings began to increase in number

upon the face of the Earth,

and daughters were bom unto them—

That the sons of the gods

saw the daughters of the Earthlings

that they were compatible;

And they took unto themselves wives
of whichever they chose.

A “mythical tablet” (CBS- 14061) reported by E. Chiera (Su-
merian Religious Texts) tells the story of those early days and of a
young god named Martu, who complained that he, too, should be
permitted to espouse a human wife. It happened, the text begins,
when

The city of Nin-ab existed, Shid-tab did not exist;

The holy tiara existed, the holy crown did not exist . . .
Cohabitation there was . . .

Bringing forth [of children] there was.

Mankind Emerges 117

“Nin-ab,” the text continues, “was a city in the settled Great
Land.” Its high priest, an accomplished musician, had a wife and a
daughter. As the people gathered to offer the gods the roasted meat
of the sacrifices, Martu, who was single, saw the priest’s daughter.
Desiring her, he went to his mother and complained:

In my city I have friends, they have taken wives.

I have companions, they have taken wives.

In my city, unlike my friends, I have not taken a wife;

I have no wife, I have no children.

Asking whether the maiden whom he desired “appreciated his
gaze,” the goddess gave her consent. The other young gods then
prepared a feast; as the marriage was announced, “in the city of
Nin-ab, the people by the sound of the copper dram were called; the
seven tambourines were sounded.”

This growing togetherness between the young astronauts and the
descendants of the Primitive Worker was not to Enlil’s liking. The
Sumerian texts tell us that “as the Land extended and the people
multiplied,” Enlil became increasingly “disturbed by Mankind’s
pronouncements” and its infatuation with sex and lust. The get-
togethers between the Anunnaki and the daughters of Man caused
him to lose sleep. “And the Lord said: ‘I will destroy the Earthling
whom I have created off the face of the Earth.’ ”

The texts inform us that when it was decided to develop the deep
mines in the Abzu, the Anunnaki also proceeded to establish a sci-
entific monitoring station at the tip of Africa. It was put in charge
of Ereshkigal, a granddaughter of Enlil. A Sumerian epic tale re-
corded the hazardous voyage of Enki and Ereshkigal from Meso-
potamia to that far-off mountainland (Kur)— a text that implies that
Ereshkigal was either abducted or in some other manner coerced by
Enki on that voyage, having been “carried off to Kur as a prize.”

(Ereshkigal, we know from other epics, was later on attacked at
her station by Nergal, one of Enki’s sons, as a result of an insult
involving Ereshkigal’s emissary. At the last moment, Ereshkigal
saved her life by offering Nergal to marry her and control together
with her the station’s “Tablets of Wisdom.”)

Enlil now saw his chance to get rid of the Earthlings when this
scientific station at the tip of Africa began to report a dangerous sit-
uation: the growing ice cap over Antarctica had become unstable,
resting upon a layer of slippery slush. The problem was that this
instability had developed just as Nibiru was about to make its ap-

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

proach to Earth’s vicinity; and Nibiru’s gravitational pull could up-
set the ice cap’s balance and cause it to slip into the Antarctic
Ocean. The immense tidal waves that this would cause could engulf
the whole globe.

When the Igigi orbiting Earth confirmed the certainty of such a
catastrophe, the Anunnaki began to assemble in Sippar, the
spaceport. Enlil, however, insisted that mankind be kept unaware
of the coming Deluge; and at a special session of the Assembly of
the Gods, he made all of them, and especially Enki, swear to keep
the secret.

The last part of the Atra-Hasis text, a major part of the Epic of
Gilgamesh, and other Mesopotamian texts describe at length the
events that followed — how the catastrophe of the Deluge was used
by Enlil to achieve the annihilation of mankind; and how Enki, op-
posed to the decision which Enlil forced upon the Assembly of the
Gods, contrived to save his faithful follower Ziusudra (“Noah”)
by designing for him a submersible vessel that could withstand the
avalanche of water.

The Anunnaki themselves, on a signal, “lifted up” in their
Rukub ilani (“chariots of the gods”), the fired-up rocket ships
“setting the land ablaze with their glare.” Orbiting the Earth in
their shuttlecraft, they watched in horror the onslaught of the tidal
waves below. All that was upon the Earth was swept off in one co-
lossal avalanche of water: A.MA.RU BA. UR RA.TA— “The
Flood swept thereover.” Sud, who had created Man with Enki,
“saw and wept. . . . Ishtar cried out like a woman in travail . . .
the gods, the Anunnaki, weep with her.” Rolling back and forth,
the tidal waves swept the soil away, leaving behind vast deposits of
mud: “All that had been created, turned back to clay.”

In The 12th Planet we have presented the evidence for our con-
clusion that the Deluge, bringing about an abrupt end to the last Ice
Age, had occurred some 13,000 years ago.

As the waters of the Deluge “went back from off the land” and
started to subside, the Anunnaki began to land on Mount Nisir
(“Mount of Salvation”)— Mount Ararat. There Ziusudra/Noah
also arrived, his vessel guided by a navigator provided by Enki.
Enlil was outraged to discover that the “seed of Mankind” was
saved; but Enki persuaded him to relent: The gods, he argued,
could no longer exist on Earth without the help of man. “And the
Lord blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them: ‘Be fruitful
and multiply, and replenish the Earth.’ ”

Mankind Emerges 119

The Old Testament, focusing its interest on the line of Noah
alone, lists no other passengers in the rescue ship. But the more de-
tailed Mesopotamian Deluge texts also mention the Ark’s naviga-
tor and disclose that at the last moment friends or helpers of
Ziusudra (and their families) also came on board. Greek versions
of the account by Berossus state that after the Deluge, Ziusudra,
his family, and the pilot were taken by the gods to stay with them;
the other people were given directions to find their way back to
Mesopotamia by themselves.

The immediate problem facing all that were rescued was food.
To Noah and his sons the Lord said: “All the animals that are upon
the earth, and all that flies in the skies, and all that creepeth on the
ground, and all the fishes of the sea, into your hands are given; all
that teemeth and that liveth, shall be yours for food.” And then
came a significant addition: “As grassy vegetation all manner of
grain have I given you.”

This little-noticed statement (Genesis 9:3), which touches on the
origins of agriculture, is substantially enlarged upon in the Sumerian
texts. Scholars are agreed that agriculture began in the Mesopotamia-
Syria-Israel crescent but are at a loss to explain why it did not begin in
the plains (where cultivation is easy) but rather in the highlands. They
are agreed that it began with the harvesting of “wild ancestors” of
wheat and barley some 12,000 years ago but are baffled by the genetic
uniformity of those early grain grasses; and they are totally at a loss to
explain the botano-genetic feat whereby— within a mere 2,000 years—
such wild emmers doubled, trebled, and quadrupled their chromo-
some pairs to become the cultivable wheat and barley of outstanding
nutritional value with the incredible ability to grow almost any-
where and with the unusual twice-a-year crops.

Coupled with these puzzles was the equal suddenness with
which every manner of fruit and vegetable began to appear from
the same nuclear area at almost the same time, and the simulta-
neous “domestication” of animals, starting with sheep and goats
that provided meat, milk, and wool.

How did it all come about when it did? Modem science has yet
to find the answer; but the Sumerian texts had already provided it
millennia ago. Like the Bible, they relate how agriculture began af-
ter the Deluge, when (in the words of Genesis) “Noah began as a
husbandman”; but like the Bible, which records that there had
been tilling of the land (by Cain) and shepherding (by Abel) long
before the Deluge, so do the Sumerian chronicles tell of the devel-
opment of crop-growing and cattle-rearing in prehistoric times.

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

When the Anunnaki had landed on Earth, a text titled by schol-
ars The Myth of Cattle and Grain states, none of the domesticated
grains or cattle had yet been in existence:

When from the heights of Heaven to Earth
Anu had caused the Anunnaki to come forth.

Grains had not yet been brought forth,
had not yet vegetated . . .

There was no ewe,
a lamb had not yet been dropped;

There was no she-goat,
a kid had not yet been dropped.

The ewe had not yet given birth to her lambs,
the she-goat had not yet given birth to her kid.

Weaving [of wool] had not yet been brought forth,
had not yet been established.

Then, in the “Creation Chamber” of the Anunnaki, their labo-
ratory for genetic manipulation, Lahar (“woolly cattle”) and
Anshan (“grains”) “were beautifully fashioned”:

In those days,

in the Creation Chamber of the gods,

in the House of Fashioning, in the Pure Mound,

Lahar and Anshan were beautifully fashioned.

The abode was filled with food for the gods.

Of the multiplying of Lahar and Anshan
the Anunnaki, in their Holy Mound, eat—
but were not satiated.

The good milk from the sheepfold

the Anunnaki, in their Holy Mound, drink—

but are not satiated.

The Primitive Workers— those who “knew not the eating of
bread . . . who ate plants with their mouths”— were already in ex-
istence:

After Anu, Enlil, Enki and Sud
had fashioned the black-headed people.

Vegetation that luxuriates they multiplied in the Land.
Four-legged animals they artfully brought into existence;

In the E. DIN they placed them.

Mankind Emerges 121

So, in order to increase the production of grains and cattle to
satiate the Anunnaki, a decision was made: Let NAM.LU.GAL.LU
—“civilized mankind”— be taught the “tilling of the land” and
the “keeping of sheep ... for the sake of the gods”:

For the sake of the satiating things,
for the pure sheepfold,

Civilized Mankind was brought into existence.

Just as it describes what had been brought into existence at that
early time, so does this text also list the domesticated varieties that
had not then been brought forth:

That which by planting multiplies,
had not yet been fashioned;

Terraces had not yet been set up . . .

The triple grain of thirty days did not exist;

The triple grain of forty days did not exist;

The small grain, the grain of the mountains,
the grain of the pure A. DAM, did not exist . . .
Tuber-vegetables of the field had not yet come forth.

These, as we shall see, were introduced on Earth by Enlil and
Ninurta some time after the Deluge.

After the Deluge had swept all off the face of the Earth, the first
problem facing the Anunnaki was where to get the seeds needed for
renewed cultivation. Fortunately specimens of the domesticated
cereals had been sent to Nibiru; and now "Anu provided them,
from Heaven, to Enlil.” Enlil then looked fora safe place where the
seeds could be sown to restart agriculture. The earth was still cov-
ered with water, and the only place that seemed suitable was “the
mountain of aromatic cedars.” We read in a fragmented text re-
ported by S. N. Kramer in his Sumerische Literarische Texte aus
Nippur:

Enlil went up the peak and lifted his eyes;

He looked down: there the waters filled as a sea.

He looked up: there was the mountain of the aromatic cedars.
He hauled up the barley, terraced it on the mountain.

That which vegetates he hauled up,
terraced the grain cereals on the mountain.

122

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The selection of the Cedar Mountain by Enlil and its conversion
into a Restricted (“Holy”) Place was, most likely, not accidental.
Throughout the Near East— indeed, worldwide— there is only one
unique Cedar Mountain of universal fame: in Lebanon. It is the lo-
cation, to this vety day (at Baalbek in Lebanon), of a vast platform
supported by colossal stone blocks (Fig. 32) that are still a marvel
of technology. It was, as we have elaborated in The Stairway to
Heaven, a Landing Place of the Anunnaki; a platform that persis-
tent legends hold to have been built in pre-Diluvial times, even as
early as the days of Adam. It was the only place, after the Deluge,
immediately suitable for handling the shuttlecraft of the Anunnaki:
the spaceport at Sippar was washed away and buried under layers
of mud.

With seeds available, the question was where to sow them. . . .
The lowlands, still filled with mud and water, were unsuitable for
habitation. The highlands, though freed from under the avalanche
of water, were soggy with the rains that began to pour down with
the neothermal age. The rivers had not found their new courses; the

Mankind Emerges 123

waters had nowhere to go; cultivation was impossible. We read
this description in a Sumerian text:

Famine was severe, nothing was produced.

The small rivers were not cleaned,
the mud was not carried off . . .

In all the lands there were no crops,
only weeds grew.

The two great rivers of Mesopotamia, the Euphrates and Tigris,
were also not functioning: “The Euphrates was not bound to-
gether, there was misery ; the Tigris was confounded, jolted and in-
jured.” The one who rose to the task of building dams in the
mountains, digging new channels for the rivers, and draining off
the excess water was Ninurta: “Thereon the lord sets his lofty
mind; Ninurta, the son of Enlil, brings great things into being”:

To protect the land, a mighty wall he raised.

With a mace he smote the rocks;

The stones the hero heaped, made a settlement . . .

The waters that had been scattered, he gathered;

What by the mountains had been dispersed,
he guided and sent down the Tigris.

The high waters it pours off the farmed land.

Now, behold—

Everything on Earth rejoiced at Ninurta,
the lord of the land.

A long text, gradually pieced together by scholars, The Feats
and Exploits of Ninurta, adds a tragic note to Ninurta’s efforts to
bring back order to the Earth on which he was superior. To cover
all the problem spots at once, Ninurta rushed from place to place in
the mountains in his airship; but “His Winged Bird on the summit
was smashed; its pinions crashed down to the earth.” (An unclear
verse suggests that he was rescued by Adad.)

We know from the Sumerian texts that first to be cultivated on
the mountain slopes were fruit trees and bushes and most certainly
grapes. The Anunnaki, the texts state, gave mankind “the excel-
lent white grapes and the excellent white wine; the excellent black
grapes and the excellent red wine.” No wonder we read in the Bi-
ble that when “Noah began as a husbandman, he planted a vine-
yard; and he drank of the wine and became drunken.”

124 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

When the drainage works carried out in Mesopotamia by Ninurta
made cultivation possible in the plains, the Anunnaki “from the
mountain the cereal grain they brought down,” and “the Land
[Sumer] with wheat and barley did become acquainted.”

In the millennia that followed mankind revered Ninurta as the
one who had taught it farming; a “Farmer’s Almanac” attributed
to him was actually found by archaeologists in a Sumerian site.
The Akkadian name for him was Urash — “The One of the
Plough”; a Sumerian cylinder seal depicted him (some believe it
shows Enlil) granting the plow to mankind (Fig. 33).

Fig. 33

While Enlil and Ninurta were credited with granting agriculture
to mankind, the credit for the introduction of domesticated herds
was given to Enki. It was after the first grains were already in culti-
vation but not yet “the grain that multiplies,” the grains with the
doubled, tripled, and quadrupled chromosomes; these were created
by Enki artificially, with Enlil’s consent:

At that time Enki spoke to Enlil:

“Father Enlil, flocks and grains

have made joyful the Holy Mound,

have greatly multiplied in the Holy Mound.

Let us, Enki and Enlil, command:

The woolly-creature and grain-that-multiplies
let us cause to come out of the Holy Mound.”

Enlil agreed, and abundance followed:

The woolly-creature they placed in a sheepfold.
The seeds that sprout they give to the mother,

Mankind Emerges 125

for the grains they establish a place.

To the workmen they give the plough and the yoke . . .

The shepherd makes abundance in the sheepfold;

The young woman sprouting abundance brings;

she lifts her head in the field:

Abundance had come from heaven.

The woolly-creature and grains that are planted

came forth in splendor.

Abundance was given to the congregated people.

The revolutionary agricultural tool — a simple, but ingeniously
designed, wooden implement — the plow, was at first pulled, as the
above text states, by putting a yoke on the farm workers. But then
Enki “brought into existence the larger living creatures”— domes-
ticated cattle — and bulls replaced people as pullers of the plow
(Fig. 34). Thus, the texts conclude, did the gods “increase the fer-
tility of the land.”

Fig. 34

While Ninurta was busy damming the mountains flanking Meso-
potamia and draining its plains, Enki returned to Africa to assess
the damage the Deluge had caused there.

As it turned out, Enlil and his offspring ended up controlling all
the high ground from the southeast (Elam, entrusted to Inan-
na/Ishtar) to the northwest (the Taurus Mountains and Asia Minor,
given to Ishkur/Adad), with the highland arching in between given
to Ninurta in the south and Nannar/Sin in the north. Enlil himself
retained the central position overlooking the olden E.DIN; the
Landing Place on the Cedar Mountain was put under the command
of Utu/Shamash. Where were Enki and his clan to go?

As Enki surveyed Africa it was evident to him that the Abzu
alone— the continent’s southern part— was insufficient. Just as in

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

12<li

Mesopotamia “abundance" was based on riverine cultivation, so
it had to be in Africa; and he turned his attention, planning, and
knowledge to the recovery of the Valley of the Nile.

The Egyptians, we have seen, held that their great gods had
come to Egypt from Ur (meaning “the olden place”). According
to Manetho, the reign of Ptah over the lands of the Nile began
17,900 years before Menes; i.e., circa 21,000 b.c. Nine thousand
years later Ptah handed over the Egyptian domain to his son Ra;
but the latter’s reign was abruptly interrupted after a brief 1 ,000
years, i.e., circa 1 1 ,000 b.c.; it was then, by our reckoning, that the
Deluge had occurred.

Then, the Egyptians believed, Ptah returned to Egypt to engage
in great works of reclamation and to literally raise it from under the
inundating waters. We find Sumerian texts that likewise attest that
Enki went to the lands of Meluhha (Ethiopia/Nubia) and Magan
(Egypt) to make them habitable for man and beast:

He proceeds to the Land Meluhha;

Enki, lord of the Abzu, decrees its fate:

Black land, may your trees be large trees,
may they be the Highland trees.

May thrones fill your royal palaces.

May your reeds be large reeds,
may they be the Highland reeds . . .

May your bulls be large bulls,
may they be th^ Highland bulls . . .

May your silver be as gold.

May your copper be tin and bronze . . .

May your people multiply;

May your hero go forth as a bull . . .

These Sumerian records, linking Enki with the African lands of
the Nile, assume a double significance: they corroborate the Egyp-
tian tales with Mesopotamian tales and link Sumerian gods —
especially the Enki-gods— with the gods of Egypt; for Ptah, we
believe, was none other than Enki.

After the lands were made habitable again, Enki divided the
length of the African continent between his six sons (Fig. 35). The
southernmost domain was regranted to NER.GAL (“Great Watch-
er ) and his spouse Ereshkigal. To his north, in the mining re-
gions, GIBIL (“The One of Fire”) was installed, having been
taught by his father the secrets of metalworking. NIN.A.GAL

Mankind Emerges 127

(“Prince of Great Waters”) was, as his name implied, given the
region of the great lakes and the headwaters of the Nile. Farther
north, in the grazing plateau of the Sudan, the youngest son,
DUMU.ZI (“Son Who Is Life”), whose nickname was “The
Herder,” was given reign.

Fig. 35

The identity of yet another son is in dispute among the scholars
(we shall offer our own solution later on). But there is no doubt
who the sixth son— actually Enki’s firstborn and legal heir— was:
He was MAR.DUK (“Son of the Pure Mound”). Because one of
his fifty epithets was ASAR, which sounds so much like the Egyp-
tian As-Sar (“Osiris” in Greek), some scholars have speculated
that Marduk and Osiris were one and the same. But these epithets
(as “All-Powerful” or “Awesome”) were applied to diverse dei-
ties, and Asar meaning “All-Seeing” was also the epithet-name of
the Assyrian god Ashur.

In fact, we find more similarities between the Babylonian Mar-
duk and the Egyptian god Ra: the former was the son of Enki, the
latter of Ptah, the two, Enki-Ptah, being in our view one and the
same; whereas Osiris was the great-grandson of Ra and thus of a
much later generation than either Ra or Marduk. In fact, there is
found in Sumerian texts scattered, but persistent, evidence sup-
porting our belief that the god called Ra by the Egyptians and Mar-
duk by the Mesopotamians was one and the same deity. Thus, a
self- laudatory hymn to Marduk (tablet Ashur/4125) declares that
one of his epithets was “The god IM.KUR.GAR RA”— “Ra
Who Beside the Mountainland Abides.”

Moreover, there is textual evidence that the Sumerians were
aware of the deity’s Egyptian name, Ra. There were Sumerians

128

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

whose personal names incorporated the divine name RA; and tablets
from the time of the Ur III Dynasty mention “Dingir Ra” and his
temple E.Dingir.Ra. Then, after the fall of that dynasty, when
Marduk attained supremacy in his favored city Babylon, its Sume-
rian name KA. DINGIR (“Gateway of the Gods”) was changed to
KA. DINGIR. RA — “Ra’s Gateway of the Gods.”

Indeed, as we shall soon show, Marduk ’s rise to prominence be-
gan in Egypt, where its best-known monument— the Great Pyramid
of Giza— had played a crucial role in his turbulent career. But the
Great God of Egypt, Marduk/Ra, yearned to rule the whole Earth,
and to do so from the olden “Navel of the Earth” in Mesopotamia.
It was this ambition that led him to abdicate the divine throne of
Egypt in favor of his children and grandchildren.

Little did he know that this would lead to two Pyramid Wars and
to his own near death.

7

WHEN EARTH WAS DIVIDED

“And the sons of Noah that came out of the ark were Shem, Ham
and Japhet . . . these were the three sons of Noah of whom all the
Earth was overspread.”

Thus is the biblical tale of the Deluge followed by the recital of
the Table of Nations (Genesis 10), a unique document, at first
doubted by scholars because it listed then unknown nation-states,
then taken apart critically, and finally — after a century and a half of
archaeological discoveries— amazing in its accuracy. It is a docu-
ment that holds a wealth of reliable historical, geographical, and
political information concerning the rise of mankind’s remnants
from the mud and desolation following the Deluge, to the heights
of civilizations and empires.

Leaving the all-important line of Shem to the last, the Table of
Nations begins with the descendants of Japhet (“The Fair One”):
“And the sons of Japhet: Gomerand Magog and Madai, Javan and
Tubal and Meshech and Tiras. And the sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz
and Riphat and Togarmah; and the sons of Javan: Elishah and Tar-
shish, the Kittim and the Dodanim. From them branched out the is-
land nations.” While the later generations had thus spread to
coastal areas and islands, the unnoticed fact was that all the first
seven nation/sons corresponded to the highlands of Asia Minor,
the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea areas— highlands that were hab-
itable soon after the Deluge, unlike the lower lying coastal areas
and islands that could become habitable only much later.

The descendants of Ham (“He Who is Hot” and also “The
Dark-Hued One”), first “Cush and Mizra’im and Put and Ca-
naan” and thereafter a host of other nation-states, correspond to
the African nation-lands of Nubia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Libya as
the core nations of African resettlement, again beginning with the
topographically higher areas, then spreading to the lowlands.

“And Shem, the father of all who descended of Eber, also had
offspring; he was the elder brother of Japhet. ’ ’ The first nation-sons of
Shem were “Elam and Ashur, Arpakhshad and Lud and Aram,
nation-states that encompassed the highlands arching from the Persian

129

130

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Gulf in the south to the Mediterranean Sea in the northwest and bor-
dering the great Land-Between-the-Rivers, which was as yet not habit-
able. Those were the lands one could call the Spaceport Lands: Mes-
opotamia, where the pre-Diluvial spaceport had been; the Cedar
Mountain, where the Landing Place remained functioning; the Land
of Shalem, where the post-Diluvial Mission Control Center was to be
established; and the adjoining Sinai peninsula, site of the future
spaceport. The name of the forefather of all these nations, Shem—
meaning “Sky Chamber” — was thus quite appropriate.

The broad division of mankind into three branches, as related in
the Bible, followed not only the geography and topography of the
areas to which man had spread, it also followed the division of the
Earth between the descendants of Enlil and the descendants of
Enki. Shem and Japhet are depicted in the Bible as good brothers,
whereas the attitude toward the line of Ham— and especially Ca-
naan— is one of bitter memories. In this there lie tales yet to be
told— tales of gods and men, and their wars. . . .

The tradition of the division of the ancient settled world into
three branches is also in accord with what we know of the rise of
civilizations.

Scholars have recognized an abrupt change in human culture about
1 1,000 b.c. — the time of the Deluge, according to our findings — and
have named that era of domestication Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age).
Circa 7400 b.c.— exactly 3,600 years later— another abmpt advance-
ment has been recognized. Scholars have named it Neolithic (“New
Stone Age”); but its principal feature was the switch from stone to
clay and the appearance of pottery. And then, “suddenly and inex-
plicably”— but exactly 3,600 years later— there blossomed out (circa
3800 b.c.) in the plain between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers the
high civilization of Sumer. It was followed, circa 3100 b.c., by the
civilization of the Nile River; and circa 2800 b.c., the third civiliza-
tion of antiquity, that of the Indus River, made its appearance. These
were the three regions allotted to mankind; of them evolved the na-
tions of the Near East, Africa, and Indo-Europe— a division faith-
fully recorded in the Old Testament’s Table of Nations.

All that, Sumerian chronicles held, was the result of deliberate
decisions by the Anunnaki:

The Anunnaki who decree the fates
sat exchanging their counsels
regarding the Earth.

The four regions they created.

When Earth Was Divided

131

With these simple words, echoed in several Sumerian texts, the
post-Diluvial fate of Earth and its inhabitants was decided. Three
regions were allotted to mankind’s three civilizations; the fourth
was retained by the Anunnaki for their own use. It was given the
name TIL.MUN, “Land of the Missiles.” In The Stairway to
Heaven we provided the evidence identifying Tilmun with the
Sinai peninsula.

Although as far as human habitation was concerned, it was
the descendants of Shem — “Sand Dwellers” in Egyptian scrip-
tures — who could reside in the unrestricted areas of the peninsu-
la, when it came to allotting the territory among the Anunnaki,
profound differences arose. Control of the site of the post-
Diluvial spaceport was tantamount to control of the links be-
tween Earth and Nibiru, as the experiences with Kumarbi and Zu
had so clearly shown. In the rekindled rivalry between the clans
of Enlil and Enki, a neutral authority over the Land of the Mis-
siles was called for.

The solution was ingenious. Of equal lineage with them was
their sister Sud. As a daughter of Anu, she bore the title NIN.MAH
(“Great Lady”). She was one of the original group of Great Anun-
naki who were pioneers on Earth, a member of the Pantheon of
Twelve. She bore a son to Enlil, a daughter to Enki, and was lov-
ingly called Mammi (“Mother of the Gods”). She helped create
Man. With her medical skills she saved many a life and was also
known as NIN.TI (“Lady Life”). But she never had her own do-
minions. To make Tilmun her domain was an idea that no one op-
posed.

The Sinai peninsula is a barren place, occupied by high granite
peaks in the south, a mountainous plateau in the center, and a hard-
soiled plain in its northern third, surrounded by chains of low
mountains and hills. Then there is a strip of sand dunes, sliding to
the Mediterranean coast. But where water can be retained, as in
several oases or in riverbeds that fill up during brief winter rains
and keep the moisture below the surface, luxuriant date palms,
fruits, and vegetables grow, and herds of sheep and goats can
graze.

The region must have been as forbidding millennia ago as it is
now. But although an abode was made for Sud in one of Mesopota-
mia’s rebuilt sites, she decided to go and take personal possession
of the mountainous region. With all her attributes of status and
knowledge, she always played a secondaiy role. When she came to
Earth, she was young and beautiful (Fig. 36a); now she was old

132

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

and nicknamed “The Cow” (Fig. 36b) behind her back. So now
that she was given her own domain, she decided to go there.
Proudly she declared: “A Mistress I am now! Alone will I stay
there, reigning forever!”

a

Fig. 34

b

Unable to dissuade her, Ninurta applied his experience in
damming and channeling waters to make his mother’s new
mountain region livable. We read of these deeds in Tablet IX
of the “Feats and Exploits of Ninurta,” as he addresses his
mother:

Since you, noble lady,

alone to the Land of Landing had gone,

Since to the Land of Casting Down
unafraid you went—

A dam I shall heap up for you,
so that the Land may have a mistress.

Completing his irrigation works, and bringing over people to
perform the required tasks, Ninurta assured his mother that she
would have an abundance of vegetation, wood products, and min-
erals in her mountain abode:

Its valleys shall be verdant with vegetation.

Its slopes shall produce honey and wine for you,

Shall produce . . . zabalum - trees and boxwood;
its terraces shall be adorned with fruit as a garden;

The Harsag shall provide you with the fragrance of the gods,
shall provide you with the shiny lodes;

When Earth Was Divided

133

Its mines will as tribute copper and tin give you;

Its mountains shall multiply cattle large and small;

The Harsag shall bring forth the four-legged creatures.

This is indeed a befitting description of the Sinai peninsula: a
land of mines, a major source in antiquity of copper, turquoise, and
other minerals; a source of the acacia wood, which was used for
temple furnishings; a verdant place wherever water was available;
a place where flocks could graze. Is it an accident that the principal
winter-river of the peninsula is still called el Arish — “The Hus-
bandman”— the very nickname (Urash) of Ninurta?

Making a home for his mother in the Sinai’s southern region
of high granite peaks, Ninurta bestowed on her a new title:
NIN.HAR.SAG (“Lady of the Head Mountain”); it was the title
by which Sud was to be called ever since.

The term “head mountain” indicates that it was the highest peak
in the area. This is the mountain nowadays known as Mount St.
Katherine, a peak revered from antiquity, millennia before the
nearby monastery was built. Rising nearby is the slightly lower
peak called by the monks Mount Moses, suggesting that it is the
Mount Sinai of the Exodus. Though this is doubtful, the fact re-
mains that the twin peaks have been deemed to be sacred from an-
tiquity. We believe that this was so because they played a pivotal
role in the planning of the post-Diluvial spaceport and the Landing
Corridor leading to it.

These new plans adopted the old principles; and to understand
the grand post-Diluvial design, we must first review the manner in
which the pre-Diluvial spaceport and its Landing Corridor were de-
veloped. At that time the Anunnaki first selected as their focal
point the twin-peaked Mount Ararat, the highest peak in Western
Asia and thus the natural landmark most visible from the skies. The
next natural and visible features were the Euphrates River and the
Persian Gulf. Drawing an imaginary north-south line from Ararat,
the Anunnaki determined that the spaceport shall be where the line
intersected the river. Then, diagonally to it from the direction of
the Persian Gulf— at a precise angle of forty-five degrees— they
drew the Landing Path. They then laid out their first settlements so
as to mark out a Landing Corridor on both sides of the Landing Path.
In the center point, Nippur was established as a Mission Control Cen-
ter; all the other settlements were equidistant from it (Fig. 25).

The post-Diluvial space facilities were planned on the same
principles. The twin-peaked Mount Ararat served as the major fo-

134 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

cal point; a line at forty-five degrees marked the Landing Path, and
a combination of natural and artificial landmarks outlined an
arrowlike Landing Corridor. The difference was, however, that
this time the Anunnaki had at their disposal the ready-made Plat-
form in the Cedar Mountain (Baalbek), and they incorporated it
into the new Landing Grid.

As before the Deluge, the twin-peaked Mount Ararat was to
serve again as the northern landmark, anchoring the Landing Cor-
ridor and the Landing Path in the center of the Corridor (Fig. 37).

135

When Earth Was Divided

The southern line of the Landing Corridor was a line connecting
the twin-peaked Ararat with the highest peak in the Sinai penin-
sula, the Harsag (Mount St. Katherine), and its twin, the slightly
lower Mount Moses.

The northern line of the Landing Corridor was a line extending
from Ararat through the Landing Platform of Baalbek and con-
tinuing into Egypt. There the terrain is too flat to offer natural
landmarks, and it was thus, we are certain, that the Anunnaki pro-
ceeded to build the artificial twin peaks of the two great pyra-
mids of Giza.

But where was this anchor to be erected?

Here came into play an east-west imaginary line, arbitrarily con-
ceived by the Anunnaki in their space sciences. They arbitrarily
divided the skies enveloping Earth into three bands or “ways.”
The northern one was the “Way of Enlil,” the southern one the
“Way of Enki,” and the central one the “Way of Anu.” Separat-
ing them were the lines known to us as the 30th parallel north and
the 30th parallel south.

The 30th parallel north appears to have been of particular—
“sacred”— significance. Holy cities from antiquity on, from
Egypt to Tibet, have been located on it. It was chosen to be the line
on which (at the intersection of the Ararat-Baalbek line) the great
pyramids were to be built; and also the line which would indicate,
in the Sinai’s central plain, the site of the Spaceport (SP). A line in
the precise middle of the Landing Corridor, the Landing Path, was
to lead to the exact location of the Spaceport on the 30th parallel.

This, we believe, is how the Landing Grid was laid out, how the
site of the Spaceport was marked off, and how the great pyramids
of Giza had come into being.

By suggesting that the great pyramids of Giza were built not by
Pharaohs but by the Anunnaki millennia earlier, we of course con-
tradict long-held theories concerning these pyramids.

The theory of nineteenth-century Egyptologists, that the Egyptian
pyramids, including the unique three at Giza, were erected by a suc-
cession of Pharaohs as grandiose tombs for themselves, has long been
dispnoven: not one of them was found to contain the body of the Pha-
raoh who was their known or presumed builder. Accordingly, the
Great Pyramid of Giza was supposed to have been built by Khufii
(Cheops), its twin by a successor named Chefra (Chephren), and the
third, small one by a third successor, Menkara (Mycerinus)— all kings
of the sixth dynasty. The Sphinx, the same Egyptologists presume.

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

13 ^

must have been built by Chephren, because it is situated next to a
causeway leading to the Second Pyramid.

For a while it was believed that proof had been found in the
smallest one of the three pyramids of Giza and the identity of the
Pharaoh who had built it established. The credit for this was
claimed by a Colonel Howard Vyse and his two assistants, who
claimed to have discovered within the pyramid the coffin and
mummified remains of the Pharaoh Menkara. The fact, however-
known to scholars for some time now but for some reason still
hardly publicized — is that neither the wooden coffin nor the skele-
tal remains were authentic. Someone— undoubtedly that Colonel
Vyse and his cronies— had brought into the pyramid a coffin dating
from about 2,000 years after Menkara had lived, and bones from
the even much later Christian times, and put the two together in an
unabashed archaeological fraud.

The current theories regarding the pyramids’ builders are an-
chored to an even greater extent on the discoveiy of the name
Khufu inscribed in hieroglyphics within a long-sealed compart-
ment within the Great Pyramid and thus apparently establishing the
identity of its builder. Unnoticed has gone the fact that the discov-
erer of that inscription was the same Colonel Vyse and his assis-
tants (the year was 1837). In The Stairway to Heaven we have put
together substantial evidence to show that the inscription was a forg-
ery, perpetrated by its “discoverers.” At the end of 1983, a
reader of that book came forward to provide us with family records
showing that his great-grandfather, a master mason named Hum-
phries Brewer, who was engaged by Vyse to help use gunpowder
to blast his way inside the pyramid, was an eyewitness to the forg-
ery and, having objected to the deed, was expelled from the site
and forced to leave Egypt altogether!

In The Stairway to Heaven we have shown that Khufu could not
have been the builder of the Great Pyramid because he had already
referred to it as existing in his time in a stela he had erected near the
pyramids; even the Sphinx, supposedly erected by the next-after
successor of Khufu, is mentioned in that inscription.

Now we find that pictorial evidence from the time of the Pha-
raohs of the very first dynasty— long before Khufu and his succes-
sors— conclusively shows that these early kings had already
witnessed the Giza marvels. We can clearly see the Sphinx both in
depictions of the king’s journey to the Afterlife (Fig. 38a) and in a
scene of his investiture by “Ancient Ones” arriving in Egypt by
boat (Fig. 38b). We also submit in evidence the well-known vie-

When Earth Was Divided

137

tory tablet of the very first Pharaoh, Menes, which depicts his
forceful unification of Egypt. On one side he is shown wearing the
white crown of Upper Egypt, defeating its chieftains and con-
quering their cities. On the other side the tablet shows him (Fig.
39a) wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt, marching through its
districts and beheading its chieftains. To the right of his head the
artist spelled out the epithet “Nar-Mer” acquired by the king; to
the left the tablet depicts the most important structure in the newly
acquired districts— the pyramid (Fig. 39b).

All scholars agree that the tablet depicts realistically the places,
fortifications, and enemies encountered by Menes in his campaign
to unify Upper and Lower Egypt; yet the pyramid symbol is the
only one that appears to have escaped the otherwise careful inter-
pretation. We hold that this symbol, as all others on the tablet, was
drawn and included so prominently in the Lower Egypt side be-
cause such a structure had actually existed there.

The whole Giza complex— pyramids and Sphinx— had thus
already existed when kingship began in Egypt; its builders
were not and could not have been the Pharaohs of the sixth dy-
nasty.

The other pyramids of Egypt— smaller, primitive by compari-
son, some fallen even before completion, all crumbling— had
indeed been built by various Pharaohs; not as tombs, nor as ceno-
taphs (monumental symbolic tombs), but in emulation of the gods.
For it was held and believed in antiquity that the Giza pyramids and
the Sphinx that accompanies them showed the way to the Stairway
to Heaven— the Spaceport— in the Sinai peninsula. Build-

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

When Earth Was Divided 139

role not in the service of men but of those “Who From Heaven to
Earth Came.”

The three pyramids of Giza, we have concluded, were built by first
erecting the smaller Third Pyramid as a scale model. Then, in keeping
with the preference for twin-peaked focal points, the two large pyra-
mids were erected. Although the Second Pyramid is smaller than the
Great Pyramid, it appears to be of the same height; this is because it is
built on somewhat higher ground, so that to achieve the same height,
it need not have been as tall as the first one.

Apart from its incomparable size, the Great Pyramid is also
unique in that, in addition to the descending passage that is found
in all the other pyramids, it has a unique Ascending Passage, a
level Corridor, two Upper Chambers, and a series of narrow com-
partments (Fig. 40). The uppermost chamber is reached via an in-
credibly elaborate Grand Gallery and an Antechamber that could
be sealed with one pull of a cord. The uppermost chamber
contained— still does— an unusual hollowed-out stone block whose
fashioning required amazing technology and which rang out as a
bell; above the chamber are the narrow series of low and rugged
spaces, offering extreme resonance.

140 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

What was the purpose of all that?

We have found many similarities between these unique features
of the Great Pyramid and the pre-Diluvial E.KUR (“House Which
Is Like a Mountain”) of Enlil, his ziggurat in Nippur. Like the
Great Pyramid, it rose high to dominate the surrounding plain. In
pre-Diluvial times the Ekur of Nippur housed the DUR.AN.KI—
“Link Heaven-Earth”— and served as Mission Control Center,
equipped with the Tablets of Destinies, the orbital data panels. It
also contained the DIR.GA, a mysterious “Dark Chamber” whose
“radiance” guided the shuttlecraft to a landing at Sippar.

But all that— the many mysteries and functions of the Ekur de-
scribed in the tale of Zu — was before the Deluge. When Mesopota-
mia was reinhabited and Nippur was reestablished, the abode of
Enlil and Ninlil there was a large temple surrounded by courtyards,
with gates through which the worshipers could enter. It was no
longer forbidden territoiy; the space-related functions, as the
Spaceport itself, had shifted elsewhere.

As a new, mysterious, and awesome Ekur, the Sumerian texts de-
scribed a “House Which Is Like a Mountain” in a distant place, under
the aegis of Ninharsag, not of Enlil. Thus, the epic tale of an early
post-Diluvial Sumerian king named Etana, who was taken aloft towaid
the Celestial Abode of the Anunnaki, states that his ascent began not
far from the new Ekur, at the “Place of the Eagles”— not far, that is,
from the Spaceport. An Akkadian “Book of Job” titled Ludlul Bel
Nimeqi (“I Praise the Lord of Deepness”) refers to the “irresistible
demon that has exited from the Ekur” in a land “across the horizon, in
the Lower World [Africa].”

Not recognizing the immense antiquity of the Giza pyramids or the
identity of their true builders, scholars have also been puzzled by this
apparent reference to an Ekur far from Sumer. Indeed, if one is to fol-
low accepted interpretations of Mesopotamian texts, no one in Meso-
potamia was ever aware of the existence of the Egyptian pyramids.
None of the Mesopotamian kings who invaded Egypt, none of the
merchants who traded with her, none of the emissaries who had visited
there — not one of them had noticed these colossal monuments .

Could that be possible?

We suggest that the Giza monuments were known in Sumer and
Akkad. We suggest that the Great Pyramid was the post-Diluvial
Ekur, of which the Mesopotamian texts did speak at length (as we
shall soon show). And we suggest that ancient Mesopotamian
drawings depicted the pyramids during their construction and after
they had been completed!

142 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

serpent symbol clearly locating it in an Enki territory. And yet an-
other (Fig. 43) endows the completed pyramid with wings, to indi-
cate its space-related function. This depiction, of which several
were found, shows the pyramid together with other amazingly ac-
curate features: a crouching Sphinx facing toward the Place of
Reeds; another Sphinx on the other side of the Lake of Reeds, sup-
porting the suggestion in Egyptian texts that there was another, fac-
ing the Sphinx in the Sinai peninsula. Both the pyramid and the
Sphinx near it are located by a river, as the Giza complex is indeed
located by the Nile. And beyond all that is the body of water on
which the homed gods are sailing, just as the Egyptians had said
that their gods had from the south, via the Red Sea.

Fig. 43

The striking similarity between this archaic Sumerian depiction
and the archaic Egyptian one (Fig. 38a) offers compelling evidence
of the common knowledge, in Egypt as in Sumer, of the pyramids
and the Sphinx. Indeed, even in such a minor detail as the precise
slope of the Great Pyramid — 52° — the Sumerian depiction appears
to be accurate.

The inevitable conclusion, then, is that the Great Pyramid was
known in Mesopotamia, if for no other reason than because it was
built by the same Anunnaki who had built the original Ekur in
Nippur; and likewise and quite logically, it, too, was called by
them E.KUR — “House Which Is Like a Mountain.” Like its pre-
decessor, the Great Pyramid of Giza was built with mysterious
dark chambers and was equipped with instruments for guiding the
shuttlecraft to the post-Diluvial Spaceport in the Sinai. And, to as-

When Earth Was Divided 143

sure its neutrality, the Pyramid was put under the patronage of Nin-
harsag.

Our solution gives meaning to an otherwise enigmatic poem ex-
alting Ninharsag as mistress of the “House With a Pointed
Peak”— a pyramid:

House bright and dark of Heaven and Earth,
for the rocketships put together;

E.KUR, House of the Gods with pointed peak;

For Heaven-to-Earth it is greatly equipped.

House whose interior glows with a reddish Light of Heaven,
pulsating a beam which reaches far and wide;

Its awesomeness touches the flesh.

Awesome ziggurat, lofty mountain of mountains—

Thy creation is great and lofty,
men cannot understand it.

The function of this “House of the Gods With Pointed Peak” is
then made clear: it was a “House of Equipment” serving to “bring
down to rest” the astronauts “who see and orbit,” a “great land-
mark for the lofty Shems” (the “sky chambers”):

House of Equipment, lofty House of Eternity:

Its foundation are stones [which reach] the water;

Its great circumference is set in the clay.

House whose parts are skillfully woven together;

House, the rightness of whose howling

the Great-Ones-Who-See-and-Orbit brings down to rest . . .

House which is great landmark for the lofty Shem;

Mountain by which Utu ascends.

[House] whose deep insides men cannot penetrate . . .

Anu has magnified it.

The text then goes on to describe the various parts of the struc-
ture: its foundation, “which is clad in awe”; its entrance, which
opens and closes as a mouth, “glowing in a dim green light”; the
threshold (“like a great dragon’s mouth opened in wait”); the
dooijambs (“like two edges of a dagger that keeps enemies
away”). Its inner chamber is “like a vulva,” guarded by “daggers
which dash from dawn to dusk”; its “outpouring”— that which it
emits— “is like a lion whom no one dares attack.”

An ascending gallery is then described: “Its vault is like a rain-

144 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

bow, the darkness ends there; in awesomeness it is draped; its
joints are like a vulture whose claws are ready to clasp.” There, at
the top of the galleiy, is ‘‘the entryway to the Mountain’s top”;
‘‘to foe it is not opened; only to Them Who Live, for them it is
opened.” Three locking devices— ‘‘the bolt, the bar and the lock
. . . slithering in an awe-inspiring place”— protect the way into
the uppermost chamber, from which the Ekur “surveys Heaven
and Earth, a net it spreads out.”

These are details whose accuracy amazes as one reads them in
conjunction with our present knowledge of the insides of the Great
Pyramid. The entrance into it was through an opening in its north
face, hidden by a swivel stone that indeed opened and closed “like
a mouth.” Stepping onto a platform, the entrant faced an opening
into a descending passage, “like a great dragon’s mouth opened in
wait” (Fig. 44a). The gaping entrance was protected from the pyr-
amid’s weight above it by two pairs of diagonally placed massive
stone blocks, “like two edges that keep enemies away,” revealing
an enigmatic carved stone in the entrance’s midst (Fig. 44b).

A short distance down the descending passage, an ascending
passage began. It led to a horizontal passage through which one
could reach the heart of the pyramid, an inner Chamber of Emis-
sions “like a vulva.” The ascending passage also led to a majestic
ascending gallery, most elaborately constructed, its walls getting
closer to each other by stages as they rise, giving the entrant a feel-

When Earth Was Divided

145

ing that these wall joints are “like a vulture whose claws are ready
to clasp” (Fig. 45). The gallery led to the uppermost chamber,
from which a “net”— a force field— “surveyed Heaven and
Earth. ' ’ The way to it was through an antechamber, built with great
complexity (Fig. 40), where three locking devices were indeed in-
stalled, ready to “slither” down and “to foe not open.”

After so describing the Ekur inside and out, the laudatory text
provides information regarding the functions and location of the
structure:

On this day the Mistress herself speaks truly;

The Goddess of the Rocketships, the Pure Great Lady,
praises herself:

“I am the Mistress; Anu has determined my destiny;
the daughter of Anu am I.

Enlil has added to me a great destiny;
his sister-princess am I.

The gods have given unto my hand

the pilot-guiding instruments of Heaven-Earth;

Mother of the sky-chambers am I.

Ereshkigal allotted to me the place-of-opening
of the pilot-guiding instruments;

The great landmark,

the mountain by which Utu rises,

I have established as my dais.”

If, as we have concluded, Ninharsag was the neutral Mistress of
the Pyramid of Giza, it follows that she should have been known
and revered as a goddess also in Egypt. This, indeed, is the case;
except that to the Egyptians she was known as Hat-Hor. Textbooks
will tell us that the name means “House of Horus”; but that is only
superficially correct. The reading stems from the hieroglyphic

writing of the name l^J depicting a house and a falcon, the falcon
having been the symbol of Horus because he could soar as a falcon.
What the goddess’s name literally meant was: “Goddess Whose
Home Is Where the ‘Falcons’ Are,” where the astronauts make
their home: the Spaceport.

This spaceport, we have determined, was located in the post-
Diluvial era in the Sinai peninsula; accordingly, the title Hat-Hor,
“Home of the Falcons,” would require that the goddess bearing it
should be Mistress of the Sinai peninsula. That, indeed, she was;

the crand gallery

Perspective views: From the lower northern cntronce (A&B)
and from the upper southern end (C).

Fig. 45

148

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

the Egyptians considered the Sinai peninsula to have been the do-
main of Hathor. All the temples and stelae erected by Egyptian
Pharaohs in the peninsula were dedicated exclusively to this
goddess. And, like Ninharsag in her later years, Hathor, too, was
nicknamed “The Cow” and was depicted with cow’s horns.

But was Hathor also— as we have claimed for Ninharsag—
Mistress of the Great Pyramid? That, amazingly but not surpris-
ingly, she was.

The evidence comes in the form of an inscription by the Pharaoh
Khufu (circa 2600 b.c.) on a commemorative stela he erected at
Giza in a temple dedicated to Isis. Known as the Inventory Stela,
the monument and its inscription clearly establish that the Great
Pyramid (and the Sphinx) had already existed when Khufu
(Cheops) began to reign. All he claimed was to have built the tem-
ple to Isis beside the already existing Pyramid and Sphinx:

Live Homs Mezdau.

To king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khufu,

Life is given!

He founded the House of Isis,

Mistress of the Pyramid,

beside the House of the Sphinx.

At his time, then, Isis (the wife of Osiris and the mother of Ho-
ms) was considered to have been the “Mistress of the Pyramid’’

- §• A

J • X m Bu t as the continuing inscription makes

clear, she was not the Pyramid's first mistress:

Live Homs Mezdau.

To king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khufu,

Life is given!

For his divine mother Isis,

Mistress of “The Western Mountain of Hathor, ’’
he made [this] writing on a stela.

Thus, not only was the Pyramid a “Mountain of Hathor” — the
exact parallel of the Sumerian “House Which Is Like a Moun-
tain”— but also it was her western mountain, implying that she also
had an eastern one. That, we know from the Sumerian sources,
was the Har-Sag, the highest peak in the Sinai peninsula.

* * *

When Earth Was Divided

149

In spite of the rivalry and suspicions between the two divine
dynasties, there is little doubt that the actual work of con-
structing the Spaceport and the control and guidance facilities
fell into the hands of Enki and his descendants. Ninurta proved
himself capable of damming and irrigation works; Utu/Sha-
mash knew how to command and operate the landing and take-
off facilities; but only Enki, the master engineer and scientist
who had been through all this before, had the required know-
how and experience for planning the massive construction
works and supervising their execution.

There is not even a hint in Sumerian texts that describe the
achievements of Ninurta and Utu that either one of them had
planned or engaged in space-related construction works. When
Ninurta, in later times, called upon a Sumerian king to build him a
ziggurat with a special enclosure for his Divine Bird, it was another
god, accompanying Ninurta, who gave the king the architectural
plans and building instructions. On the other hand, several texts re-
ported that Enki had passed to his son Marduk the scientific knowl-
edge he had possessed. The texts report a conversation between
father and son, after Marduk had approached his father with a diffi-
cult question:

Enki answered his son Marduk:

“My son, what is it you do not know?

What more could I give to you?

Marduk, what is it that you do not know?

What could I give you in addition?

Whatever I know, you know!”

Since the similarities between Ptah and Enki as the father, and
Marduk and Ra as son, are so strong, we should not be surprised at
all to find that Egyptian texts did connect Ra with space facilities
and with related construction works. In this he was assisted by Shu
and Tefnut, Geb and Nut, and Thoth, the god of magical things,
The Sphinx, the "divine guide” that showed the way eastward ex-
actly along the 30th parallel, bore the features of Hor-Akhti (“Fal-
con of the Horizon”)— the epithet for Ra. A stela erected near the
Sphinx in Pharaonic times bore an inscription that directly named
Ra as the engineer (“Extender of the Cord”) who built the “Pro-
tected Place” in the “Sacred Desert,” from which he could “as-
cend beautifully” and “traverse the skies”:

150 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Thou extendest the cords for the plan,

thou didst give form to the lands . . .

Thou didst make secret the Lower World . .

Thou hast built for thee a place protected

in the sacred desert, with hidden name.

Thou risest by day opposite them . . .

Thou art rising beautifully . . .

Thou art crossing the sky with a good wind . . .

Thou art traversing the sky in the celestial barque . . .

The sky is jubilating,

the Earth is shouting of joy.

The crew of Ra do praising every day;

He comes forth in triumph.

Egyptian texts asserted that Shu and Tefnut were involved in
Ra’s extensive space-related works by “upholding the skies over
Earth.” Their son Geb bore a name that stemmed from the root
gbb—“ to pile up, to heap up”— attesting, scholars agree, to his en-
gaging in works that entailed piling up; a strong suggestion of his
involvement in the actual construction of the pyramids.

An Egyptian tale concerning the Pharaoh Khufu and his three
sons reveals that in those days the secret plans of the Great Pyramid
were in the custody of the god whom the Egyptians called Thoth,
the god of astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and land survey-
ing. It will be recalled that a unique feature of the Great Pyramid
was its upper chambers and passages. However, because these
passages were sealed off— we shall show how, when, and why —
just where they branch off from the descending passage, all the
Pharaohs who attempted to emulate the Giza pyramids built theirs
with lower chambers only, being either unable to emulate the upper
chambers for lack of precise architectural knowledge, or (in time)
simply unaware of their existence. But Khufu, it seems, was aware
of the existence of these two secret chambers within the Great Pyr-
amid, and at one point was on the verge of discovering the plans of
their construction, for he was told where the god Thoth had hidden
them.

Written on the so-called Westcar Papyrus and titled “Tales of the
Magicians,” the tale relates that “one day, when king Khufti reigned
over all the land,” he called in his three sons and asked them to tell
him tales of the “deeds of the magicians” of olden times. First to
speak was “the royal son Khafra” who related “a tale of the days of
thy [Khufii’s] forefather Nebka ... of what came to pass when he

When Earth Was Divided

151

went into the temple of Ptah. ’ ’ It was a tale of how a magician brought
a dead crocodile back to life. Then the royal son Bau-ef-Ra told of a
miracle in the days of Khufu’s earlier forefather, when a magician
parted the waters of a lake, so that a jewel could be retrieved from its
bottom; “and then the magician spake and used his magic speech and
he brought the water of all the lake again to its place.”

Somewhat cynical, the third son Hor-De-Def arose and spoke,
saying: “We have heard about the magicians of the past and their
doings, the truth of which we cannot verify. Now I know of things
done in our time.” The Pharaoh Khufu asked what they were; and
Hor-De-Def answered that he knew of a man named Dedi who
knew how to replace a decapitated head, to tame a lion, and who
also knew “the Pdut numbers of the chambers of Thoth.”

Hearing this, Khufu became extremely curious, for he had been
seeking to find out the “secret of the Chambers of Thoth” in the
Great Pyramid (already blocked and hidden in Khufu’s time!). So
he ordered that the sage Dedi be found and fetched from his abode,
an island off the tip of the Sinai peninsula.

When Dedi was brought before the Pharaoh, Khufu first tested
his magical powers, such as bringing back to life a goose, a bird,
and an ox, whose heads were cut off. Then Khufu asked: “Is it true
what is said, that thou knowest the Pdut numbers for the Iput of
Thoth?” And Dedi answered: “I know not the numbers, O king,
but I know the place the Pdut are in.”

Egyptologists are by and large agreed that Iput conveyed the
meaning “secret chambers of the primeval sanctuary” and Pdut
meant “designs, plans with numbers.”

Answering Khufu, the magician (his age was given as one hun-
dred and ten years) said: “I know not the information in the designs,
O king, but I know where the plans-with-numbers were hidden by
Thoth. ’ ’ In answer to further questioning he said: ‘ ‘There is a box of
whetstone in the sacred chamber called the Chart Room in Heliop-
olis; they are in that box.”

Excited, Khufu ordered Dedi to go and find the box for him. But
Dedi answered that it was neither he nor Khufu who could obtain
the box; it was destined to be found by a future descendant of
Khufu. This, he said, was decreed by Ra. Yielding to the god’s
will, Khufu, as we have seen, ended up only building near the
Sphinx a temple dedicated to the Mistress of the Pyramid.

The circle of evidence is thus complete. Sumerian and Egyptian
texts confirm each other and our conclusions: The same neutral

152

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

goddess was the mistress of Sinai’s highest peak and of the artifi-
cial mountain erected in Egypt, both to serve as anchors of the
Landing Corridor.

But the Anunnaki’s desire to keep the Sinai peninsula and its fa-
cilities neutral did not prevail for long. Rivalry and love tragically
combined to upset the status quo; and the divided Earth was soon
embroiled in the Pyramid Wars.

THE PYRAMID WARS

“In the year 363 His Majesty Ra, the holy one, the Falcon of
the Horizon, the Immortal who forever lives, was in the land of
Khenn. He was accompanied by his warriors, for the enemies
had conspired against their lord. . . . Horus, the Winged
Measurer, came to the boat of Ra. He said to his forefather: O
Falcon of the Horizon, I have seen the enemy conspire against
thy Lordship, to take the Luminous Crown unto themselves.’

. Then Ra, the holy one, the Falcon of the Horizon, said
unto Horus, the Winged Measurer: ‘Lofty issue of Ra, my be-
gotten: Go quickly, knock down the enemy whom you have
seen.’ ’’

Thus began the tale inscribed on the temple walls in the ancient
Egyptian city of Edfu. It is the tale, we believe, of what could only
be called the First Pyramid War— a war that had its roots in the
never-ending struggle for control over Earth and its space facilities
and in the shenanigans of the Great Anunnaki, especially En-
ki/Ptah and his son Ra/Marduk.

According to Manetho, Ptah turned over the dominion over
Egypt after a reign of 9,000 years; but the reign of Ra was cut short
after 1,000 years— by the Deluge, we have concluded. Then there
followed a reign of 700 years by Shu, who helped Ra “control the
skies over Earth,” and the 500-year reign of Geb (“Who Piles Up
the Earth”). It was at that time, circa 10,000 B.c., that the space
facilities— the Spaceport in the Sinai and the Giza pyramids— were
built.

Although the Sinai peninsula, where the Spaceport was estab-
lished, and the Giza pyramids were supposed to remain neutral
under the aegis of Ninharsag, it is doubtful whether the builders
of these facilities— Enki and his descendants— had really any
intention of relinquishing control over these installations. A
Sumerian text, which begins with an idyllic description, has
been named by scholars a “Paradise Myth.” Its ancient name
was Enki and Ninharsag , and it is, in fact, a record of the polit-
ically motivated lovemaking between the two, a tale of a deal

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154 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

between Enki and his half-sister Ninharsag pertaining to the
control of Egypt and the Sinai peninsula— of the pyramids and
the Spaceport.

The tale’s time is after Earth was apportioned between the An-
unnaki, with Tilmun (the Sinai peninsula) granted to Ninharsag
and Egypt to Enki’s clan. It was then, the Sumerian tale relates,
that Enki crossed the marshy lakes that separated Egypt and the
Sinai peninsula and came unto the lonely Ninharsag for an orgy of
lovemaking:

To the one who is alone,

To the Lady of Life, mistress of the land,

Enki came unto the wise Lady of Life.

He causes his phallus to water the dikes;

He causes his phallus to submerge the reeds . . .

He poured his semen into the great lady of the Anunnaki,

poured the semen in the womb of Ninharsag;

She took the semen into the womb, the semen of Enki.

Enki’s real intention was to obtain a son by his half-sister; but
the offspring was a daughter. Enki then made love to the daughter
as soon as she became “young and fair,” and then to his grand-
daughter. As a result of these sexual activities, a total of eight
gods— six female and two male— were bom. Angered by the in-
cest, Ninharsag used her medical skills to sicken Enki. The Anun-
naki who were with him pleaded for his life, but Ninharsag was
determined: “Until he is dead, I shall not look upon him with the
‘Eye of Life’!”

Satisfied that Enki had indeed been finally stopped, Ninurta —
who went to Tilmun for inspection— returned to Mesopotamia to
report the developments at a meeting attended by Enlil, Nan-
na/Sin, Utu/Shamash and Inanna/Ishtar. Unsatisfied, Enlil ordered
Ninurta to return to Tilmun and bring back Ninharsag with him.
But in the interim, Ninharsag had pity on her brother and changed
her mind. “Ninharsag seated Enki by her vulva and asked: ‘My
brother, what hurts thee?’ ” After she cured his body part by part,
Enki proposed that the two of them as masters of Egypt and the
Sinai assign tasks, spouses, and territories to the eight young gods:

Let Abu be the master of the plants;

Let Nintulla be the lord of Magan;

Let Ninsutu many Ninazu;

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Let Ninkashi be she who sates the thirsts;

Let Nazi marry Nindara;

Let Azimua marry Ningishzida;

Let Nintu be the queen of the months;

Let Enshag be the lord of Tilmun!

Egyptian theological texts from Memphis likewise held that
“there came into being” eight gods from the heart, tongue, teeth,
lips, and other parts of the body of Ptah. In this text, too, as in the
Mesopotamian one, Ptah followed up the bringing forth of these
gods by assigning abodes and territories to them: “After he had
formed the gods, he made cities, established districts, put the gods
in their sacred abodes; he built their shrines and established their
offerings.” All that he did “to make rejoice the heart of the Mis-
tress of Life.”

If, as it appears, these tales had a basis in fact, then the rivalries
that such confused parentages brought about could only be aggra-
vated by the sexual shenanigans attributed to Ra as well. The most
significant among these was the assertion that Osiris was truly the
son of Ra and not of Geb, conceived when Ra had come by stealth
unto his own granddaughter. This, as we have earlier related, lay at
the core of the Osiris-Seth conflict.

Why had Seth, to whom Upper Egypt had been allotted by
Geb, coveted Lower Egypt, which was granted to Osiris?
Egyptologists have offered explanations in terms of geography,
the land’s fertility, etc. But as we have shown, there was one
more factor— one that, from the gods’ point of view, was more
important than how many crops a region could grow: the Great
Pyramid and its companions at Giza; whoever controlled them
shared in the control of the space activities, of the comings and
goings of the gods, of the vital supply link to and from the
Twelfth Planet.

For a while Seth succeeded in his ambition, having outwitted
Osiris. But “in the year 363” following the disappearance of Osi-
ris, the young Horus became the avenger of his father and launched
a war against Seth— the First Pyramid War. It was, as we have
seen, also the first war in which the gods involved men in their
struggles.

Supported by other Enki-gods reigning in Africa, the avenger
Horus began the hostilities in Upper Egypt. Aided by the Winged
Disk that Thoth had fashioned for him, Homs persistently ad-
vanced northward, toward the pyramids. A major battle took place

15$ THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

in the “water district,” the chain of lakes that separates Egypt
from the Sinai peninsula, and a good many of Seth’s followers
were slain. After peacemaking efforts by other gods had failed,
Seth and Homs engaged in personal combat in and over the Sinai
peninsula. In the course of one battle, Seth hid in “secret tunnels”
somewhere in the peninsula; in another battle, he lost his testicles.
So the Council of the Gods gave the whole of Egypt “as heritage
. . . to Homs.”

And what had become of Seth, one of the eight gods descended
from Ptah?

He was banished from Egypt and took up abode in Asiatic lands
to the east, including a place that enabled him “to speak out from
the sky.” Was he the god called Enshag in the Sumerian tale of
Enki and Ninharsag, the one to whom Tilmun (the Sinai peninsula)
was allotted by the two lovemakers? If so, then he was the Egyp-
tian (Hamitic) god who had extended his domain over the land of
Shem later known as Canaan.

It was in this outcome of the First Pyramid War that there lies an
understanding of biblical tales. Therein also lay the causes of the
Second Pyramid War.

In addition to the Spaceport and the guidance facilities, there
was also a need after the Deluge for a new Mission Control Center,
to replace the one that had existed before in Nippur. We have
shown (in The Stairway to Heaven) that the need to equidistance
this center from the other space-related facilities dictated its
locating on Mount Moriah (“The Mount of Directing”), the site of
the future city of Jerusalem.

That site, by both Mesopotamian and biblical accounts, was lo-
cated in the lands of Shem— a dominion of the Enlilites. Yet it
ended up under an illegal occupation by the line of Enki, the Ham-
itic gods, and by the descendants of the Hamitic Canaan.

The Old Testament refers to the land of which Jerusalem in time
became the capital as Canaan, after the fourth and youngest son of
Ham. It also singled out Canaan for special rebuke and consigned
his descendants to be subservient to the descendants of Shem. The
improbable excuse for this treatment was that Ham— not his son
Canaan— had inadvertently seen the naked genitals of his father
Noah; therefore, the Lord had put a curse upon Canaan: “Cursed
be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren . . .
Blessed be Yahweh the god of Shem; may Canaan be a servant
unto them.”

The tale in the Book of Genesis leaves many aspects unex-

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plained. Why was Canaan accursed if it was his father who had
accidentally transgressed? Why was his punishment to be a
slave of Shem and to the god of Shem? And how were the gods
involved in the crime and its punishment? As one reads the sup-
plemental information in the ex-biblical Book of Jubilees, it be-
comes clear that the real offense was the illegal occupation of
Shem’s territory.

After mankind was dispersed and its various clans allotted their
lands, the Book of Jubilees relates, “Ham and his sons went to the
land which he was to occupy, [the land] which he acquired as his
portion in the countiy of the south.” But then, journeying from
where Noah had been saved to his allotted land in Africa, “Canaan
saw the land of Lebanon [all the way down] to the river of Egypt,
that it was very good.” And so he changed his mind: “He went not
into the land of his inheritance to the west of the sea [west of the
Red Sea]; he dwelt [instead] in the land of Lebanon, eastward and
westward of the Jordan.”

His father and his brothers tried to dissuade Canaan from such an
illegal act: “And Ham his father, and Cush and Mizra’im his
brothers, said unto him: ‘Thou hast settled in a land which is not
thine, and which did not fall to us by lot; do not do so; for if thou
dost do so, thou and thy sons will be fallen in the land and be ac-
cursed through sedition; for by sedition ye have settled, and by se-
dition will thy children fall, and thou shall be rooted out forever.
Dwell not in the dwelling of Shem; for to Shem and his sons did it
come by their lot.’ ”

Were he to illegally occupy the territory assigned to Shem, they
pointed out, “Cursed art thou and cursed shalt thou be beyond the
sons of Noah, by the curse which we bound ourselves by an oath in
the presence of the Holy Judge and in the presence of Noah our fa-
ther. . . .

“But Canaan did not hearken unto them, and dwelt in the
land of Lebanon from Hamath to the entering of Egypt, he and
his sons until this day. For this reason is that land named Ca-
naan.”

Behind the biblical and pseudoepigraphical tale of a territo-
rial usurpation by a descendant of Ham must lie a tale of a simi-
lar usurpation by a descendant of the God of Egypt. We must
bear in mind that at the time the allotment of lands and territo-
ries was not among the peoples but among the gods; the gods,
not the people, were the landlords. A people could only settle a
territory allotted to their god and could occupy another’s terri-

158

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

tory only if their god had extended his or her dominion to that
territory, by agreement or by force. The illegal seizure of the
area between the Spaceport in the Sinai and the Landing Place
in Baalbek by a descendant of Ham could have occurred only if
that area had been usurped by a descendant of the Hamitic dei-
ties, by a younger god of Egypt.

And that, as we have shown, was indeed the result of the First
Pyramid War.

Seth's trespass into Canaan meant that all the space-related
sites— Giza, the Sinai peninsula, Jerusalem— came under the con-
trol of the Enki gods. It was a development in which the Enlilites
could not acquiesce. And so, soon thereafter— 300 years later, we
believe— they deliberately launched a war to dislodge the illegal
occupiers from the vital space facilities. This Second Pyramid War
is described in several texts, some found in the original Sumerian,
others in Akkadian and Assyrian renderings. Scholars refer to these
texts as the “Myths of Kur“— “myths” of the Mountain Lands;
they are, in fact, poetically rendered chronicles of the war to con-
trol the space-related peaks— Mount Moriah; the Harsag (Mount
St. Katherine) in the Sinai; and the artificial mount, the Ekur (the
Great Pyramid) in Egypt.

It is clear from the texts that the Enlilite forces were led and
commanded by Ninurta, “Enlil’s foremost warrior,” and that
the first encounters were in the Sinai peninsula. The Hamitic
gods were beaten there; but they retreated to continue the war
from the mountain lands of Africa. Ninurta rose to the chal-
lenge, and in the second phase of the war carried the battle to
the strongholds of his foes; that phase entailed vicious and
ferocious battles. Then, in its final phase, the war was fought at
the Great Pyramid, the last and impregnable stronghold of
Ninurta’s opponents; there the Hamitic gods were besieged un-
til they ran out of food and water.

This war, which we call the Second Pyramid War, was com-
memorated extensively in Sumerian records— both written chroni-
cles and pictorial depictions.

Hymns to Ninurta contain numerous references to his feats and
heroic deeds in this war; a great part of the psalm “Like Anu Art
Thou Made” is devoted to a record of the struggle and the final
victory. But the principal and most direct chronicle of the war is the
epic text Lugal-e Ud Melam-bi, best collated and edited by Samuel

The Pyramid Wars 159

Geller in Altorientalische Texte und Untersuchungen. Like all
Mesopotamian texts, it is so titled after its opening line:

King, the glory of thy day is lordly;

Ninurta, Foremost, possessor of the Divine Powers,

who into the throes of the Mountainlands stepped forth.

Like a flood which cannot be stopped,

the Enemyland as with a girdle you tightly bound.

Foremost one, who in battle vehemently enters;

Hero, who in his hand the Divine Brilliant Weapon carries;

Lord: the Mountainland you subdued as your creature.

Ninurta, royal son, whose father to him had given might;

Hero: in fear of thee, the city has surrendered . . .

O mighty one—

the Great Serpent, the heroic god,

you tore away from all the mountains.

Thus extolling Ninurta, his feats, and his Brilliant Weapon,
the poem also describes the location of the conflict (“the
Mountainlands”) and his principal enemy: “The Great Ser-
pent,” leader of the Egyptian deities. The Sumerian poem
identifies this adversary several times as Azag and once refers
to him as Ashar, both well-known epithets for Marduk, thereby
establishing the two principal sons of Enlil and Enki— Ninurta
and Marduk— as the leaders of the opposing camps in the Sec-
ond Pyramid War.

The second tablet (one of thirteen on which the long poem was
inscribed) describes the first battle. Ninurta’s upper hand is as-
cribed to both his godly weapons and a new airship that he built for
himself after his original one had been destroyed in an accident. It
was called IM.DU.GUD, usually translated “Divine Storm Bird”
but which literally means “That Which Like Heroic Storm Runs”;
we know from various texts that its wingspan was about seventy-
five feet.

Archaic drawings depicted it as a mechanically constructed
“bird,” with two wing surfaces supported by cross beams (Fig.
47a); an undercarriage reveals a series of round openings, perhaps
air intakes for jetlike engines. This aircraft, from millennia ago,
bears a remarkable resemblance not only to the early biplanes of
the modem air age, but also an incredible likeness to the sketch
made in 1497 by Leonardo da Vinci, depicting his concept of a
man-powered flying machine (Fig. 47b).

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b

The Imdugud was the inspiration for Ninurta’s emblem— a he-
roic lion-headed bird resting on two lions (Fig. 48) or sometimes
on two bulls. It was in this “crafted ship”— a manufactured
vehicle— “that which in war destroys the princely abodes,” that
Ninurta soared into the skies during the battles of the Second Pyra-
mid War. He soared so high that his companions lost sight of him.
Then, the texts relate, “in his Winged Bird, against the walled
abode” he swooped down. “As his Bird neared the ground, the
summit [of the enemy’s stronghold] he smashed.”

Chased out of his strongholds, the Enemy began to retreat.
While Ninurta kept up the frontal attack, Adad roamed the country-
side behind the enemy lines, destroying the adversary’s food sup-
plies: “In the Abzu, Adad the fish caused to be washed away .

The Pyramid Wars

161

the cattle he dispersed.” When the Enemy kept retreating into the
mountains, the two gods “like an onrushing flood the mountains
ravaged.”

As the battles extended in time and scope, the two leading
gods called on the others to join them. “My lord, to the battle
which is becoming extensive, why don’t you go?” they asked a
god whose name is missing in a damaged verse. The question
was clearly also addressed to Ishtar, for she is mentioned by
name: “In the clash of weapons, in the feats of heroship, Ishtar
her arm did not hold back.” As the two gods saw her, they
shouted encouragingly to her: “Advance hither without stop-
ping! Put your foot down firmly on the Earth! In the mountains,
we await thee! ”

“The weapon which is lordly brilliant, the goddess brought
forth ... a horn [to direct it] she made for it.” As she used it
against the enemy in a feat “that to distant days” shall be re-
membered, “the skies were like red-hued wool in color.” The
explosive beam “tore apart [the enemy], made him with his
hand clutch his heart.”

The continued tale, on tablets v-viii, is too damaged to be prop-
erly read. The partial verses suggest that after the intensified attack
with Ishtar’s assistance, there arose a great cry and lamentation in
the Enemy land. “Fear of Ninurta’s Brilliance encompassed the
land,” and its residents had to use substitutes instead of wheat and
barley “to grind and mill as flour.”

Under this onslaught the Enemy forces kept retreating south. It
was then that the war assumed its ferocious and vicious character,
when Ninurta led the Enlilite gods in an attack on the heartland of

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Nergal’s African domain and his temple-city, Meslam. They
scorched the earth and made the rivers run red with the blood of the
innocent bystanders— the men, women, and children of the Abzu.

The verses describing this aspect of the war are damaged on the
tablets of the main text; its details are, however, available from
various other fragmented tablets that deal with the “overwhelming
of the land” by Ninurta,” a feat whereby he earned the title “Van-
quisher of Meslam.” In these battles the attackers resorted to
chemical warfare. We read that Ninurta rained on the city poison-
bearing missiles, which “he catapulted into it; the poison, by it-
self, destroyed the city.”

Those who survived the attack on the city escaped to the sur-
rounding mountains. But Ninurta “with the Weapon That Smites
threw fire upon the mountains; the godly Weapon of the Gods,
whose Tooth is bitter, smote down the people.” Here, too, some
kind of chemical warfare is indicated:

The Weapon Which Tears Apart

robbed the senses;

The Tooth skinned them off.

Tearing-apart he stretched upon the land;

The canals he filled with blood,

in the Enemyland for dogs like milk to lick.

Overwhelmed by the merciless onslaught, Azag called on his
followers to show no resistance: “The arisen Enemy to his wife
and child called; against the lord Ninurta he raised not his arm. The
weapons of Kur with soil were covered” (i.e. , hidden away);
“Azag them did not raise.”

Ninurta took the lack of resistance as a sign of victory. A text
reported by F. Hrozny (“Mythen von dem Gotte Ninib”) relates
how, after Ninurta killed the opponents occupying the land of the
Harsag (Sinai) and went on “like a Bird” to attack the gods who
“behind their walls retreated” in Kur, he defeated them in the
mountains. He then burst out in a song of victory:

My fearsome Brilliance like Anu’s is mighty;

Against it, who can rise?

I am lord of the high mountains,

of the mountains which to the horizon raise their peaks.

In the mountains, I am the master.

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The Pyramid Wars

But the claim of victory was premature. By his nonresistance
tactics, Azag had escaped defeat. The capital city was indeed de-
stroyed, but not so the leaders of the Enemy. Soberly, the text
Lugal-e observed: “The scorpion of Kur Ninurta did not annihi-
late.” Instead, the Enemy gods retreated into the Great Pryamid,
where “the Wise Craftsman” — Enki? Thoth? — raised up a protec-
tive wall “which the Brilliance could not match,” a shield through
which the death rays could not penetrate.

Our knowledge of this final and most dramatic phase of the Sec-
ond Pyramid War is augmented by texts from “the other side.”
Just as Ninurta’s followers composed hymns to him, so did the fol-
lowers of Nergal. Some of the latter, which have also been discov-
ered by archaeologists, were put together in Gebete und Hymnen
an Nergal by J. Bollenriicher.

Recalling the heroic feats of Nergal in this war, the texts relate
how, as the other gods found themselves hemmed in within the
Giza complex, Nergal— “Lofty Dragon Beloved of Ekur”— “at
night stole out” and, carrying awesome weapons and accompanied
by his lieutenants, broke through the encirclement to reach the
Great Pyramid (the Ekur). Reaching it at night, he entered through
“the locked doors which by themselves can open.” A roar of wel-
come greeted him as he entered:

Divine Nergal,

Lord who by night stole out,

had come to the battle!

He cracks his whip, his weapons clank . . .

He who is welcome, his might is immense;

Like a dream at the doorstep he appeared.

Divine Nergal, the One Who Is Welcome:

Fight the enemy of Ekur,

lay hold on the Wild One from Nippur!

But the high hopes of the besieged gods were soon dashed. We
learn more of the last phases of this Pyramid War from yet another
text, first pieced together by George A. Barton (Miscellaneous
Babylonian Texts) from fragments of an inscribed clay cylinder
found in the ruins of Enlil’s temple in Nippur.

As Nergal joined the defenders of the Great Pyramid (“the For-
midable House Which Is Raised Up Like a Heap”), he strength-
ened its defenses through the various ray-emitting crystals (mineral
“stones”) positioned within the pyramid:

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The Water-Stone, the Apex-Stone,
the . . . -Stone, the . . .

... the lord Nergal
increased its strength.

The door for protection he . . .

To heaven its Eye he raised,

Dug deep that which gives life . . .

... in the House
he fed them food.

With the pyramid’s defenses thus enhanced, Ninurta resorted to
another tactic. He called upon Utu/Shamash to cut off the pyra-
mid’s water supply by tampering with the “watery stream” that
ran near its foundations. The text here is too mutilated to enable a
reading of the details; but the tactic apparently achieved its pur-
pose.

Huddled in their last stronghold, cut off from food and water,
the besieged gods did their best to ward off their attackers. Until
then, in spite of the ferocity of the battles, no major god had fallen
a casualty to the fighting. But now one of the younger gods—
Horns, we believe— trying to sneak out of the Great Pyramid
disguised as a ram, was struck by Ninurta’s Brilliant Weapon and
lost the sight of his eyes. An Olden God then cried out to Ninhar-
sag— reputed for her medical wonders — to save the young god’s
life:

At that time the Killing Brightness came;

The House’s platform withstood the lord.

Unto Ninharsag there was an outcry:

“. . . the weapon ... my offspring
with death is accursed. ...”

Other Sumerian texts call this young god “offspring who did
not know his father,” an epithet befitting Horns, who was born
after his father’s death. In Egyptian lore the Legend of the Ram
reports the injuries to the eyes of Horus when a god "blew fire”
at him.

It was then, responding to the “outcry,” that Ninharsag decided
to intervene to stop the fighting.

The ninth tablet of the Lugal-e text begins with the statement of
Ninharsag, her address to the Enlilite commander, her own son
Ninurta, “the son of Enlil . . . the Legitimate Heir whom the

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The Pyramid Wars

sister-wife had brought forth. ” In telltale verses she announced her
decision to cross the battle lines and bring an end to the hostilities:

To the House Where Cord-Measuring begins,

Where Asar his eyes to Anu raised,

I shall go.

The cord I will cut off,

for the sake of the warring gods.

Her destination was the “House Where Cord-Measuring be-
gins,” the Great Pyramid!

Ninurta was at first astounded by her decision to “enter alone
the Enemyland”; but since her mind was made up, he provided her
with “clothes which should make her unafraid” (of the radiation
left by the beams?). As she neared the pyramid, she addressed
Enki: “She shouts to him . . . she beseeches him.” The ex-
changes are lost by the breaks in the tablet; but Enki agreed to sur-
render the pyramid to her:

The House that is like a heap,

that which I have as a pile raised up—

its mistress you may be.

There was, however, a condition: The surrender was subject to a
final resolution of the conflict until “the destiny-determining
time” shall come. Promising to relay Enki’s conditions, Ninharsag
went to address Enlil.

The events that followed are recorded in part in the Lugal-e epic
and in other fragmentary texts. But they are most dramatically de-
scribed in a text titled I Sing the Song of the Mother of the Gods.
Surviving in great length because it was copied and recopied
throughout the ancient Near East, the text was first reported by P.
Dhorme in his study La Souveraine des Dieux. It is a poetic text in
praise of Ninmah (the “Great Lady”) and her role as Mammi
(“Mother of the Gods”) on both sides of the battle lines.

Opening with a call upon “the comrades in arms and the com-
batants” to listen, the poem briefly describes the warfare and its
participants, as well as its nearly global extent. On the one side
were “the firstborn of Ninmah” (Ninurta) and Adad, soon joined
by Sin and later on by Inanna/Ishtar. On the opposing side are
listed Nergal, a god referred to as “Mighty, Lofty One”—
Ra/Marduk— and the “God of the two Great Houses” (the two

166 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

great pyramids of Giza) who had tried to escape camouflaged in a
ram’s skin: Homs.

Asserting that she was acting with the approval of Anu, Ninhar-
sag took the surrender offer of Enki to Enlil. She met him in the
presence of Adad (while Ninurta remained at the battlefield). “O
hear my prayers!” she begged the two gods as she explained her
ideas. Adad was at first adamant:

Presenting himself there, to the Mother,

Adad thus said:

‘‘We are expecting victory.

The enemy forces are beaten.

The trembling of the land he could not withstand.”

If she wants to bring about a cessation of hostilities, Adad said,
let her call discussions on the basis that the Enlilites are about to
win:

“Get up and go — talk to the enemy.

Let him attend the discussions
so that the attack be withdrawn.”

Enlil, in less forceful language, supported the suggestion:

Enlil opened his mouth;

In the assembly of the gods he said:

“Whereas Anu at the mountain the gods assembled,
warfare to discourage, peace to bring,
and has dispatched the Mother of the Gods
to entreat with me —

Let the Mother of the Gods be an emissary.”

Turning to his sister, he said in a conciliatory vein:

“Go, appease my brother!

Raise unto him a hand for Life;

From his barred doorway, let him come out!”

Doing as suggested, Ninharsag “his brother went to fetch, put
her prayers before the god. ” She informed him that his safety, and
that of his sons, was assured: “by the stars she gave a sign.”

The Pyramid Wars 167

As Enki hesitated she said to him tenderly: “Come, let me lead
you out.” And as he did, he gave her his hand. . . .

She conducted him and the other defenders of the Great Pyramid
to the Harsag, her abode. Ninurta and his warriors watched the
Enkites depart.

And the great and impregnable structure stood unoccupied, si-
lent.

Nowadays the visitor to the Great Pyramid finds its passages and
chambers bare and empty, its complex inner construction appar-
ently purposeless, its niches and nooks meaningless.

It has been so ever since the first men had entered the pyramid. But
it was not so when Ninurta had entered it— circa 8670 b.c. according
to our calculations. “Unto the radiant place,” yielded by its defenders,
Ninurta had entered, the Sumerian text relates. And what he had done
after he had entered changed not only the Great Pyramid from within
and without but also the course of human affairs.

When, for the first time ever, Ninurta went into the “House
Which Is Like a Mountain,” he must have wondered what he
would find inside. Conceived by Enki/Ptah, planned by Ra/Mar-
duk, built by Geb, equipped by Thoth, defended by Nergal, what
mysteries of space guidance, what secrets of impregnable defense
did it hold?

In the smooth and seemingly solid north face of the pyramid, a
swivel stone swung open to reveal the entranceway, protected by
the massive diagonal stone blocks, just as the text lauding Ninhar-
sag had described. A straight Descending Passage led to the lower
service chambers where Ninurta could see a shaft dug by the de-
fenders in search for subterranean water. But his interest focused
on the upper passages and chambers; there, the magical “stones”
were arrayed— minerals and crystals, some earthly, some heav-
enly, some the likes of which he had never seen. From them there
were emitted the beamed pulsations for the guidance of the astro-
nauts and the radiations for the defense of the structure.

Escorted by the Chief Mineralmaster, Ninurta inspected the ar-
ray of “stones” and instruments. As he stopped by each one of
them, he determined its destiny— to be smashed up and destroyed,
to be taken away for display, or to be installed as instruments else-
where. We know of these “destinies,” and of the order in which
Ninurta had stopped by the stones, from the text inscribed on tab-
lets 10-13 of the epic poem Lugal-e. It is by following and cor-
rectly interpreting this text that the mystery of the purpose and

168

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

function of many features of the pyramid’s inner structure can be
finally understood.

Going up the Ascending Passage, Ninurta reached its junction
with the imposing Grand Gallery and a Horizontal Passage.
Ninurta followed the Horizontal Passage first, reaching a large
chamber with a corbeled roof. Called the “vulva” in the Ninharsag
poem, this chamber’s axis lay exactly on the east-west center line
of the pyramid. Its emission (“an outpouring which is like a lion
whom no one dares attack”) came from a stone fitted into a niche
that was hollowed out in the east wall (Fig. 49). It was the SHAM
(“Destiny”) Stone. Emitting a red radiance which Ninurta “saw
in the darkness,” it was the pulsating heart of the pyramid. But it
was anathema to Ninurta, for during the battle, when he was aloft,
this stone’s “strong power” was used “to grab to kill me, with a
tracking which kills to seize me.” He ordered it “pulled out . . .
be taken apart . . . and to obliteration be destroyed.”

I “ — s — ■ -- . — . » .

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The Pyramid Wars

Returning to the junction of the passages, Ninurta looked around
him in the Grand Gallery (Fig. 45). As ingenious and complex as
the whole pyramid was, this gallery was breathtaking and a most
unusual sight. Compared to the low and narrow passages, it rose
high (some twenty-eight feet) in seven overlapping stages, its walls
closing in ever more at each stage. The ceiling was also built in
slanting sections, each one angled into the massive walls so as not
to exert any pressure on the segment below it. Whereas in the nar-
row passages only “a dim green light glowed,” the Gallery glit-
tered in multicolored lights— “its vault is like a rainbow, the
darkness ends there.” The many-hued glows were emitted by
twenty-seven pairs of diverse crystal stones that were evenly
spaced along the whole length of each side of the Gallery (Fig.
50a). These glowing stones were placed in cavities that were pre-
cisely cut into the ramps that ran the length of the Gallery on both
sides of its floor. Firmly held in place by an elaborate niche in the
wall (Fig. 50b), each crystal stone emitted a different radiance,
giving the place its rainbow effect. For the moment Ninurta passed
by them on his way up; his priority was the uppermost Grand
Chamber and its pulsating stone.

Atop the Grand Gallery, Ninurta reached a great step which led
through a low passage to an Antechamber of unique design (Fig.
46). There three portcullises— “the bolt, the bar and the lock” of
the Sumerian poem— elaborately fitted into grooves in the walls
and floor, hermetically sealed off the uppermost Great Chamber:
“to foe it is not opened; only to Them Who Live, for them it is
opened.” But now, by pulling some cords, the portcullises were
raised, and Ninurta passed through.

He was now in the pyramid’s most restricted (“sacred”) cham-
ber, from which the guiding “Net” (radar?) was “spread out” to
“survey Heaven and Earth.” The delicate mechanism was housed
in a hollowed-out stone chest; placed precisely on the north-south
axis of the pyramid, it responded to vibrations with bell-like reso-
nance. The heart of the guidance unit was the GUG (“Direction
Determining”) Stone; its emissions, amplified by five hollow
compartments constructed above the chamber, were beamed out
and up through two sloping channels leading to the north and south
faces of the pyramid. Ninurta ordered this stone destroved: “Then,
by the fate-determining Ninurta, on that day was the Gug stone from
its hollow taken out and smashed.”

To make sure no one would ever attempt to restore the “Direc-
tion Determining” functions of the pyramid, Ninurta also ordered

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The Pyramid Wars

the three portcullises removed. First to be tackled were the SU
(“Vertical”) Stone and the KA.SHUR.RA (“Awesome, Pure
Which Opens”) Stone. Then “the hero stepped up to the SAG.KAL
Stone” (“Sturdy Stone Which Is In Front”). “He called out his
full strength,” shook it out of its grooves, cut the cords that were
holding it, and “to the ground set its course.”

Now came the turn of the mineral stones and crystals posi-
tioned atop the ramps in the Grand Gallery. As he walked down
Ninurta stopped by each one of them to declare its fate. Were it
not for breaks in the clay tablets on which the text was written,
we would have had the names of all twenty-seven of them; as it
is, only twenty-two names are legible. Several of them Ninurta
ordered to be crushed or pulverized; others, which could be
used in the new Mission Control Center, were ordered given to
Shamash; and the rest were carried off to Mesopotamia, to be
displayed in Ninurta’s temple, in Nippur, and elsewhere as
constant evidence of the great victory of the Enlilites over the
Enki-gods.

All this, Ninurta announced, he was doing not only for his sake
but for future generations, too: “Let the fear of thee”— the Great
Pyramid— “be removed from my descendants; let their peace be
ordained.”

Finally there was the Apex Stone of the Pyramid, the UL (“High
As The Sky”) Stone: “Let the mother’s offspring see it no more,”
he ordered. And, as the stone was sent crashing down, “let every-
one distance himself,” he shouted. The “Stones,” which were
“anathema” to Ninurta, were no more.

The deed having been done, Ninurta’s comrades urged him to
leave the battleground and return home. AN DIM DIM.MA,
“Like Anu Art Thou Made,” they told him in praise; “The Radi-
ant House where the cord-measuring begins, the House in the land
which thou hast come to know— rejoice in having entered it.”
Now, return to thy home, where thy wife and son await thee: “In
the city which thou lovest, in the abode of Nippur, may thy heart be
at rest . . . may thy heart become appeased.”

The Second Pyramid War was over; but its ferocity and feats,
and Ninurta’s final victory at the pyramids of Giza, were remem-
bered long thereafter in epic and song— and in a remarkable draw-
ing on a cylinder seal, showing Ninurta’s Divine Bird within a
victory wreath, soaring in triumph above the two great pyramids
(Fig. 51).

172

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 51

And the Great Pyramid itself, bare and void and without its apex
stone, has been left standing as a mute witness to the defeat of its
defenders.

PEACE ON EARTH

How did the Pyramid Wars end?

They ended as great wars have ended in historic times: with a
peace conference; with the gathering of the combatants, as at the
Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), which redrew the map of
Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, or the Paris Peace Conference
that ended World War I (1914-1918) with the Treaty of Versailles.

The first inkling that the warring Anunnaki had convened in a
similar manner some ten thousand years ago comes from the text
which George A. Barton found inscribed on a broken clay cylinder.
It was an Akkadian version of a much earlier Sumerian text; and
Barton concluded that the clay cylinder was deposited by the ruler
Naram-Sin circa 2300 b.c. when this Akkadian king repaired the
platform of Enid's temple in Nippur. Comparing the Mesopota-
mian text with texts inscribed at about the same time by Egyptian
Pharaohs, Barton noted that the Egyptian texts “centered around
the king and are interested in his fortunes as he enters among the
gods’’; the Mesopotamian text, on the other hand, “concerned it-
self with the community of the gods”; its subject was not the aspi-
rations of the king but the affairs of the gods themselves.

In spite of damage to the text, especially at the beginning, it is
clear that the leading gods gathered in the aftermath of a great and
bitter war. We learn that they convened at the Harsag, Ninharsag’s
mountain abode in the Sinai, and that she played the role of peace-
maker. Yet she is not treated by the text’s author as a really neu-
tral personage: he repeatedly refers to her by the epithet Tsir
(“Snake”), which stamped her as an Egyptian/Enkite goddess
and conveyed a derogatory connotation.

The text’s opening verses, as we have already stated, briefly de-
scribed the last phases of the war and the conditions within the be-
sieged pyramid that led to the defenders’ “outcry,” leading to
Ninharsag’s decision to intervene.

We learn from the continuing ancient chronicle that Ninharsag
first went with her idea of stopping the fighting and convening a
peace conference to Enid's camp.

173

174

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The Enlilites' first reaction to Ninharsag’s bold initiative was to ac-
cuse her of giving aid and comfort to the “demons.” Ninharsag denied
the accusation: “My House is pure,” she answered. But a god whose
identity is unclear challenged her sarcastically: “Is the House which is
loftier and brightest of all”— the Great Pyramid— also “pure”?

“Of that I cannot speak,” Ninharsag answered; “its brilliance
Gibii is soldiering.”

After the first accusations and explanations wore off some of the
bitterness, a symbolic ceremony of forgiveness was performed. It
involved two jars holding waters of the Tigris and Euphrates riv-
ers, a ceremony of symbolic baptism making Ninharsag welcome
again in Mesopotamia. Enlil touched her with his “bright scep-
ter,” and the “power of her was not overthrown.”

The objections of Adad to a peace conference rather than uncon-
ditional surrender were already reported by us in the previous chap-
ter. But then Enlil agreed, saying to her: “Go, appease my
brother.” We have already read in another text how Ninharsag
crossed the battle lines to arrange the cease-fire. Having brought
out Enki and his sons, Ninharsag took them to her abode in the
Harsag. The Enlilite gods were already there, waiting.

Announcing that she was acting in behalf of “the great lord Anu
. . . Anu the Arbiter,” Ninharsag performed a symbolic cere-
mony of her own. She lighted seven fires, one each for the gathered
gods: Enki and his two sons: Enlil and his three sons (Ninurta,
Adad, and Sin). She uttered an incantation as she lit each fire: “A
fieiy offering to Enlil of Nippur. . . to Ninurta . . . to Adad . . .
to Enki coming from the Abzu ... to Nergal coming from
Meslam.” By nightfall the place was ablaze: “as sunlight was the
great light set off by the goddess.”

Ninharsag then appealed to the wisdom of the gods and extolled
the virtues of peace: “Mighty are the fruits of the wise god; the great
divine river to his vegetation shall come ... its overflowing will
make [the land] like a garden of god.” The abundance of plants and
animals, of wheat and other grains, of vines and fruits, and the bene-
fits of a “triple-sprouting mankind” planting, building, and serving
the gods — all to follow peace — were then outlined by her.

After Ninharsag had finished her oracle of peace, Enlil was the
first one to speak. “Removed is the affliction from the face of the
Earth,” Enlil declared to Enki; “the Great Weapon is lifted up.”
He agreed to let Enki regain his abode in Sumer: “The E.DIN shall
be a place for thy Holy House,” with enough land around to bear
fruit for the temple and to have seeded fields.

Peace on Earth 175

On hearing this Ninurta objected. “Let it not come!” the
“prince of Enlil” shouted.

Again Ninharsag took the floor. She reminded Ninurta how he
had toiled, “day and night with might,” to enable cultivation and
cattle herding in the land, how he “raised the foundations, filled
[the earth], raised [the dykes].” Then the affliction of war de-
stroyed it all, “all, in its entirety.” “Lord of life, god of fruit,”
she appealed to him, “let the good beer pour in double measure!
Make abundant the wool!”— agree to the peace terms!

Overcome by her plea, Ninurta relented: “O my mother, brilliant
one! Proceed; the flour I will not withhold ... in the kingdom the
garden will be restored ... To end affliction, I [too] earnestly pray.”

Now the peace negotiations could proceed; and we pick up the
tale of the unprecedented encounter between the two warring gods
from the text I Sing the Song of the Mother of the Gods. First to
address the assembled Anunnaki was Enki:

Enki addressed to Enlil words of lauding:

“O one who is foremost among the brothers.

Bull of Heaven, who the fate of Mankind holds:

In my lands, desolation is widespread;

All the dwellings are filled with sorrow

by your attacks.”

The first item on the agenda was thus the cessation of hostilities —
peace on Earth — and Enlil readily agreed, on condition that the territo-
rial disputes be brought to an end and the lands rightfully belonging to
the Enlilites and the people of the line of Shem be vacated by the
Enkites. Enki agreed to cede forever these territories:

“I will grant thee the ruler’s position

in the gods’ Restricted Zone;

The Radiant Place, in thy hand I will entrust!”

In so ceding the Restricted Zone (the Sinai peninsula with its
Spaceport) and the Radiant Place (the site of Mission Control Cen-
ter, the future Jerusalem) Enki had a firm condition. In return for
granting Enlil and his offspring eternal rights to those lands and vi-
tal sites, the sovereignty of Enki and his descendants over the Giza
complex had to be recognized for all time.

Enlil agreed but not without a condition: The sons of Enki who
had brought about the war and used the Great Pyramid for combat

17* THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

purposes should be barred from ruling over Giza, or over the whole
of Lower Egypt, for that matter.

Pondering the condition over, Enki agreed. He then and there
announced his decision. The lord of Giza and Lower Egypt, he
said, will be a young son of his, espoused to one of the female dei-
ties bom when Enki had made love to Ninharsag: “For the formi-
dable House Which Is Raised Like a Heap, he appointed the
prince whose brilliant wife from the cohabitation with Tsir [Nin-
harsag] was brought forth. The strong prince who is like a full-
grown ibex— him he appointed, and commanded him to guard the
Place of Life.” He then granted the young god the exalted title
NIN.GISH.ZI.DA (“Lord of the Artifact of Life”).

Who was Ningishzidda? Scholars find the information concerning
him meager and confusing. He is mentioned in Mesopotamian
texts in association with Enki, Dumuzi, and Ninharsag; in the
Great God List he is included among the gods of Africa following
Nergal and Ereshkigal. The Sumerians depicted him with Enki’s
emblem of the entwined serpents and with the Egyptian Ankh sign
(Fig. 52 a,b). Yet they viewed Ningishzidda favorably; Ninurta be-
friended him and invited him to Sumer. Some texts suggest that his
mother was Ereshkigal, Enlil s granddaughter; our own conclusion
is that he was indeed a son of Enki, conceived during Enki’s and

a

Fig. 52

b

Peace on Earth

177

Ereshkigal’s stormy voyage to the Lower World. As such, he was
acceptable to both sides as guardian of the secrets of the pyramids.

A hymn which Ake W. Sjoberg and E. Bergmann (“The Collec-
tion of the Sumerian Temple Hymns”) believe was composed by the
daughter of Saigon of Akkad in the third millennium b.c. exalted the
pyramid-house of Ningishzidda and confirmed its Egyptian location:

Enduring place, light-hued mountain
which in an artful fashion was founded.

Its dark hidden chamber is an awe-inspiring place;
in a Field of Supervision it lies.

Awesome, its ways no one can fathom.

In the Land of the Shield

your pedestal is closely knit as a fine-mesh net . . .

At night you face the heavens,

your ancient measurements are surpassing.

Your interior knows the place where Utu rises,
the measure of its width is far reaching.

Your prince is the prince whose pure hand is outstretched,
whose luxuriant and abundant hair
flows down on his back —
the lord Ningishzida.

The concluding verses of the hymn twice restate the location of this
unique structure: the “Land of the Shield.” It is a term equivalent to
the Akkadian meaning of the Mesopotamian name for Egypt: the
Land Magan, “The Land of the Shield.” And another hymn copied
and translated by Sjobeig (tablet UET 6/1) called Ningishzidda “the
falcon among the gods,” a designation commonly applied in Egyptian
texts to Egyptian gods and found in Sumerian texts only one other
time, applied to Ninurta, conqueror of the pyramids.

What did the Egyptians call this son of Enki/Ptah? Their “god of
the cord who measures the Earth” was Thoth; he was (as the Tales of
the Magicians related) the one appointed to be guardian of the secrets
of the Giza pyramids. It was Thoth, according to Manetho, who re-
placed Homs on the throne of Egypt; it happened circa 8670 b.c.
—just at the time when the Second Pyramid War had ended.

Having thus settled the disputes between them, the great Anun-
naki turned to the affairs of mankind.

As one reads the ancient words it becomes clear that this peace
conference dealt not only with the cessation of hostilities and the
drawing of binding territorial lines; it also laid the plans for the

178

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

manner in which the lands would be settled by mankind! We read
that Enki “before the feet of the adversary [Enlil] laid the cities
that were allotted him”; Enlil, in turn, “before the feet of his ad-
versary [Enki] the land Sumer he laid out.”

We can envision the two brothers facing each other, Enki— as
always— the more concerned of the two about mankind and its fate.
Having dealt with the disputes among the Anunnaki themselves, he
now turns to the future of mankind. In the aftermath of the Deluge,
it was given farming and domesticated animals; now it was the
chance to look and plan ahead, and he seized the opportunity. The
ancient text may well describe a spontaneous act: Enki drawing on
the ground, “before the feet of Enlil,” a plan for the establishment
of human settlement centers in his lands; agreeing, Enlil responds
by drawing ‘ ‘before the feet of Enki” the plan for the restoration of
the pre-Diluvial cities of southern Mesopotamia (Sumer).

If the olden pre-Diluvial cities of Mesopotamia were to be re-
stored, Enki had a condition: He and his sons were to be allowed to
come freely to Mesopotamia; and he, Enki, was to be given back
the site of Eridu, the hallowed place of his first Earth Station. Ac-
cepting the condition, Enlil said: “In my land, let your abode be-
come everlasting; from the day that you shall come into my
presence, the laden table shall exhale delicious smelis for thee.”
Enlil expressed the hope that in return for this hospitality, Enki
would help bring prosperity also to Mesopotamia: “Pour abun-
dance on the Land, each year increase its fortunes.”

And with all these matters settled, Enki and his sons departed for
their African domains.

After Enki and his sons had departed, Enlil and his sons contem-
plated the future of their territories, both old and new. The first chroni-
cle, the one reported by Barton, relates that in order to reaffirm the
status of Ninurta as second to Enlil and superior over his brothers, En-
lil put him in chatge of the Olden Land. The territories of Adad in the
northwest were extended by a thin “finger” (Lebanon) to include the
Landing Place at Baalbek. The territory that was in contention— we
can describe it as Greater Canaan, from the border of Egypt in the
south to the border of Adad in the north, with modem Syria includ-
ed was put under the aegis of Nannar and his offspring. To that
effect “a decree was established,” sealed, and celebrated with a meal
offering shared by all the Enlil ite gods.

A more dramatic version of these final proceedings is found in
the I Sing the Song of the Mother of the Gods text. We learn

Peace on Earth

179

that at that crucial moment, the rivalry between Ninurta— the legal
heir, being the son of Enlil by his half-sister — and Nannar, the
firstborn of Enlil by his official spouse Ninlil, had broken out in
full force. Enlil, we are told, contemplated favorably the attributes
of Nannar: “A firstborn . . . of beautiful countenance, perfect of
limbs, wise without compare.” Enlil “him loved” because he gave
him the two all-important grandchildren, the twins Utu/Shamash and
Inanna/Ishtar; he called Nannar SU.EN — “Multiplying Lord” — an
endearing epithet from which there stemmed the Akkadian/Semitic
name for Nannar: Sin. But as much as Enlil had favored Nannar, the
fact was that it was Ninurta who was the legal heir; he was “Enlil’s
foremost warrior,” and he led the Enlilites to victory.

As Enlil wavered between Sin and Ninurta, Sin enlisted the help
of his wife Ningal, who appealed to Enlil as well as to his spouse
Ninlil, the mother of Sin:

To the place of decision he called Ningal,

Suen invited her to approach.

A favorable decision she asked of the father . . .

Enlil weighed [her words] . . .

Before the mother she [pleaded] . . .

“Remember the childhood,” she said Ito Ninlil] . . .

The mother quickly embraced him . . .

She said to Enlil: . . .“Follow your heart’s desire”. . .

Could one ever imagine, in those far-reaching decisions that
were to affect the fate of gods and men for millennia to come, that
the female spouses had played such a decisive role? We read of
Ningal coming to the aid of her husband; we see Ninlil being en-
listed in persuading the wavering Enlil. But then there entered the
scene yet another great goddess — and by her words achieved an
unintended decision. . . .

As Enlil was urged by Ninlil to “follow your heart” rather
than his mind, to prefer the firstborn over the legal heir,
“Ninurta opened his mouth and said . . .” His words of oppo-
sition are lost by a damage to the verses; but, as the tale is con-
tinued, we learn that Ninharsag threw in her weight behind her
son Ninurta:

She cried out and lamented to her brother;

Like a pregnant woman she was agitated, [saying:]

“Inside the Ekur I call to my brother,

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

my brother who an infant made me carry;

upon my brother I call!”

But Ninharsag’s appeal was ill-worded. She meant to appeal as
Enlil’s sister in behalf of the child (Ninurta) she bore him; but her
call sounded like an appeal to Enki. Enraged, Enlil shouted at her:
‘‘Who is this brother of yours that you call? This brother, who an
infant made you cany?” And he made a decision favoring the line
of Sin. Ever since then, and to this very day, the Land of the
Spaceport has been known as Sin’s land— the Sinai peninsula.

As his final act Enlil appointed Sin’s son as the commander of
the Mission Control Center:

He called in Shamash

the grandchild of Ninlil.

He took him [by the hand];

In Shulim he placed him.

Jerusalem — Ur-Shulim, the ‘‘City of Shulim”— was given to
Shamash to command. Its name, SHU.LIM, meant “The Supreme
Place of the Four Regions,” and the Sumerian emblem of the
“Four Regions” (Fig. 53a) applied to it, possibly the forerunner of
the Jewish emblem called the Star of David (Fig. 53b).

Replacing the pre-Diluvial Nippur as the post-Diluvial Mission
Control Center, Jerusalem also acquired Nippur’s former title of
being the Navel of the Earth— the central point in the Divine Grid
that made the comings and goings between Earth and Nibiru possi-

a

Fig. 53

b

Peace on Earth 181

ble. Emulating the concentric pre-Diluviai plan based on Nippur,
the site selected for the “Navel of the Earth”— Mount Moriah—
was located on the middle line, the Landing Path, within the
Landing Corridor (Fig. 54); it was equidistant from the Landing
Platform in Baalbek (BK) and the Spaceport itself (SP).

The two anchors of the Landing Corridor also had to be equidis-

182

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

tant from Mission Control Center (JM); but here there was a
need to make a change in the original plans, for the previous artifi-
cially constructed “House Which Is Like a Mountain”— the Great
Pyramid was stripped of its ciystals and equipment and was ren-
dered useless by Ninurta. The solution was to erect, still precisely
on the northwestern corridor line but north of Giza, a new Beacon
City. The Egyptians called it the City of Annu; its hieroglyphic
symbol depicted it as a high sloping tower (Fig. 55) with an even
taller superstructure pointing skyward as an arrow. The Greeks,
many millennia later, called the place Heliopolis (“City of He-
lios,” the Sun god)— the same name they applied to Baalbek. In
both instances it was a translation of earlier names relating the two
places to Shamash, “Who Is Bright as the Sun”; Baalbek, in fact,
was called in the Bible Beth-Shemesh, House of Shamash, or Heli-
opolis in Greek.

Fig. 55

The shifting of the beacon site at the northwestern anchor of the
Landing Corridor from Giza (GZ) to Heliopolis (HL) also required
a shift in the southeastern anchor, to keep the two anchors equidis-
tant from Mount Moriah. A mount only slightly lower than Mount
St. Katherine, but still precisely on the Corridor line, was found
and adapted to the task. It is called Mount Umm-Shumar (Mount of
Sumer’s Mother— US on our map). Sumerian geographical lists
called the two adjoining mountains in Tilmun KA HARSAG
(“The Gateway Peak”) and HARSAG ZALA.ZALAG (“Peak
Which Emits the Brilliance”).

The construction, manning, and operation of the aerospace facil-
ities in Tilmun and Canaan required new supply routes and protec-
tive outposts. The sea lane to Tilmun was improved by the
establishment of a port city (“Tilmun City,” as distinguished from
the “Land Tilmun”) on the eastern shore of the Red Sea, probably

Peace on Earth

183

where the port city of el-Tor still exists. It also led, we believe, to
the establishment of the world’s oldest town: Jericho, which was
dedicated to Sin ( Yeriho in Hebrew) and his celestial symbol, the
Moon.

The age of Jericho has been an enigma that has continuously baf-
fled the scholars. They broadly divide man’s advancement (which
spread from the Near East) into the Mesolithic (“Middle Stone”)
Age, which saw the introduction of agriculture and animal domes-
tication circa 1 1,000 b.c.; a Neolithic (“New Stone”) Age 3,000
years later, bringing with it villages and pottery; and then, finally,
Sumer’s urban civilization, again 3,000 years later. Yet here was
Jericho: an urban site occupied and built by unknowns sometime
circa 8500 b.c., when man had not yet learned to lead even a vil-
lage life. . . .

The puzzles posed by Jericho pertain not only to its age, but also
to what the archaeologists have found there: houses, built on stone
foundations, had doors equipped with wooden jambs; the walls
were carefully plastered and painted red, pink, and other colors—
sometimes even covered with murals. Neat hearths and basins
were sunk in whitewashed plaster floors, floors that were often
decorated with patterns. Below the floors the dead were sometimes
buried— buried but not forgotten: at least ten skulls were found
which were filled with plaster to recreate the features of the de-
ceased (Fig. 50). The features they reveal were by all opinions
more advanced and finer than those of the usual Mediterranean
dwellers of the time. All this was protected by a massive wall that
surrounded the town (millennia before Joshua!). It was raised in
the middle of a ditch nearly thirty feet wide and seven feet deep,
dug out of the rock “without the help of picks and hoes” (James
Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East). It was “an
explosive development ... a spectacular development whose
causes,” Mellaart says, “are still unknown to us.”

The enigma of prehistoric Jericho is compounded by the evi-
dence of its round grain silos, one of which was found still partly
standing. In a hot depression near the Dead Sea, 825 feet below sea
level, in an inhospitable place unsuitable for grain cultivation,
there was found evidence of ample supplies and continued storage
of wheat and barley. Who could have built this advanced town that
early, who had come to live in such a place, and whom did it serve
as a fortified store city?

The solution to this enigma lies, in our opinion, in the chronol-
ogy of the “gods,” not of men. It lies in the fact that the incredible

184

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 5$

first urban settlement in Jericho (from circa 8500 b.c. to 7000 b.c.)
exactly matches the period which, according to Manetho, encom-
passed the reign of Thoth in Egypt (from about 8670 to 7100 b.c.).
His accession, as we have seen from the Mesopotamian texts, fol-
lowed the Peace Conference. Egyptian texts say of his accession
that it was pronounced “in the presence of the Determiners of Annu,
following the night of the battle” and after he had helped “defeat the
Storm Wind” (Adad) “and the Whirlwind” (Ninurta), and then as-
sisted in “making the two combatants be at peace.”

The period the Egyptians associated with the reign of Thoth was
a time of peace among the gods, when the Anunnaki first and fore-
most established settlements relating to the construction and pro-
tection of the new space facilities.

The sea lane to Egypt and Tilmun, via the Red Sea, had to be
augmented by a land route that could connect Mesopotamia with
the Mission Control Center and the Spaceport. From time imme-

Peace on Earth

185

modal this land route led up the Euphrates River to the major way
station of Harran in the Balikh River region. From there the trav-
eler had the choice of either to continue south down the Mediterra-
nean coast— the road later called by the Romans Via Maris (“The
Sea Way”)— or to proceed on the east side of the Jordan, along the
equally famous King’s Highway. The former was the shortest
route to Egypt; the latter could lead to the Gulf of Eilat, the Red
Sea, Arabia, and Africa, as well as into the Sinai peninsula; it
could also lead to the western side of the Jordan via several suitable
crossing points. It was the route over which the African gold was
brought.

The most vital of these, the one that led directly to Mission Con-
trol Center in Jerusalem, was the crossing point at Jericho. It was
there that the Israelites crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land.
It was there, we suggest, that millennia earlier the Anunnaki estab-
lished a town to guard the crossing point and to supply the travelers
with provisions for the continued journey. Until man made Jericho
his home, it was an outpost of the gods.

Would the Anunnaki have built a settlement only on the west
side of the Jordan, leaving the more vital eastern side, where the
King’s Highway ran, unprotected? It stands to reason that a settle-
ment should have existed on the opposite, eastern side of the Jor-
dan, too. Though little known outside of archaeological circles,
such a place has indeed been found; and what was discovered there
is even more astounding than what had been uncovered at Jericho. _ ■

The puzzling place with astounding remains was first unearthed
in 1929 by an archaeological mission organized by the Vatican’s
Pontifical Biblical Institute. The archaeologists, led by Alexis
Mallon, were surprised by the high level of civilization found
there. Even the oldest level of habitation (circa 7500 b.c.) was
paved with bricks, and though the period of settlement stretched
from the end of the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, the archaeolo-
gists were amazed to find that the same civilization revealed itself
at all levels.

The place is named after the mound where it was found— Tell
Ghassul; its ancient name is not known. Together with several sat-
ellite settlements, it clearly controlled the vital crossover point and
the road leading to it— a road still followed to this day to a crossing
point nowadays called the Allenby Bridge (Fig. 57). The strategic
location of Tell Ghassul had been noted by the archaeologists when
they began to dig up its remains: “From atop the mound, one has
an interesting all-around view: the Jordan on the west as a dark

18$ THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

line; to the northwest, the hillock of ancient Jericho; and beyond it,
the mountains of Judea, including Beth-El and the Mount of Olives
of Jerusalem. Bethlehem is obscured by Mount el-Muntar, but the
heights of Tekoah and the environs of Hebron can be seen” (A.
Mallon, R. Koeppel, and R. Neuville, Teleilat Ghassul, Compte
Rendu des Fouilles de I’Institut Biblique Pontifical). To the north,
the view was unobscured for some thirty miles; to the east, one
could see Mount Moab and the foremounts of Mount Nebo; to the
south, ‘‘beyond the mirror of the Dead Sea, one could see the salt
mountain. Mount Sodom.”

The principal remains uncovered at Tell Ghassul cover a period
when it was occupied by highly advanced settlers from before 4000
b.c. to circa 2000 b.c. (when the place was abruptly abandoned).

j Unexcavated mounda

T.ICUHiU /,;•

V* T. N IM * I M "

Allenby Bridge

•‘JE8ICH0

ft /*.

Bt*AT«fA 2/*

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Peace on Earth

187

The artifacts and irrigation system, of a much higher standard than
had then prevailed in the area, convinced the archaeologists that
the settlers had come from Mesopotamia.

Of the three hillocks that together formed the large mound, two
appear to have been used as abodes and one as a work area. The
latter was found to have been subdivided into rectangularlike seg-
ments, within which there were built circular “pits,” frequently in
pairs. That they were not hearths for food preparation is suggested
not only by their pairing and profusion (why would six or eight of
them be required in one compartment?), but also by the fact that
some of them were cylindrical and went quite deep into the ground.
Combined with them were enigmatic “bands of ashes” (Fig. 58),
the remains of some combustible material, which were covered
with fine sand and then with regular soil, only to form the founda-
tion of yet another layer of such “band of ashes.”

On the surface, the ground was strewn with pebbles, the remains
of rocks broken up by some force that also blackened them.
Among the artifacts found was a small, circular object made of
fired clay (Fig. 59), shaped with precision for some unknown tech-
nical purpose.

The mystery only deepened by the discoveries in the residential
areas. There the walls of the rectangular houses collapsed as
though hit by a sudden force just above ground level, as a result of
which the upper parts of the walls collapsed neatly inward.

188

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 59

Because of this neat collapse, it was possible to piece together
some of the astounding murals that were painted and overpainted
on these walls. In one instance a cagelike mesh shown over the ob-
ject created on the wall a three-dimensional illusion. In one house
every wall appeared to have been painted with some scene; in an-
other a recessed divan was so built that it enabled the dweller,
while reclining, to view a mural that covered the whole opposite
wall. It depicted a row of people— the first two of whom were
seated on thrones— facing toward (or greeting) another person who
had apparently stepped out of an object emitting rays.

The archaeologists who had discovered these murals during the
1931-32 and 1932-33 excavations theorized that the rayed object
might have been similar to a most unusual rayed “star” found
painted in another building. It was an eight-pointed “star” withina
larger eight-pointed “star,” culminating in a burst of eight rays
(Fig. 60). The precise design, employing a variety of geometric
shapes, was artistically executed in black, red, white, gray, and
combinations thereof; a chemical analysis of the paints used
showed that they were not natural substances but sophisticated
compounds of twelve to eighteen minerals.

The mural’s discoverers assumed that the eight-rayed “star”
had some “religious significance,” pointing out that the eight-
pointed star, standing for the planet Venus, was the celestial sym-
bol of Ishtar. However, the fact is that no evidence of any religious
worship whatsoever, no “cult objects,” statuettes of gods, etc.,
had been found at Tell Ghassul, yet another anomaly of the place.
This, we suggest, indicates that it was inhabited not by worshipers
but by those who were the subject of worshiping: the “gods” of
antiquity, the Anunnaki.

In fact, we have come upon a similar design in Washington,

Peace on Earth

189

Fig. 6 0

D.C. It can be seen in the foyer of the headquarters of the National
Geographic Society: a floor mosaic of a compass denoting the So-
ciety’s interest in the four comers of the Earth and their intermedi-
ate points (east, northeast; north, northwest; west, southwest;
south, southeast). It was this, we believe, that the design’s ancient
painters, too, had in mind: to indicate their, and the place’s, asso-
ciation with the four regions of the Earth.

That the rayed “star” had no sacred significance is further at-
tested by the disrespect with which it was surrounded by graffiti.
These (Fig. 00) depict thick-walled buildings, fins of fishes, birds,
wings, a ship, and even (some suggest) a sea dragon (upper left-
hand comer); in these graffiti, yellow and brown of various shades
appear in addition to the colors already mentioned.

Of particular interest are two shapes in which large twin “eyes”
are prominent. We have a better knowledge of what they depicted,
for such shapes were found painted, on a much larger scale and
with greater detail, on the walls of other houses. The objects were
depicted as spherical or oval in shape, their upper part layered and
painted in black and white. The center was dominated by the two
large “eyes,” perfect black disks within white circles. The bottom
part showed in red two (or four?) extended supports; between these

190 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

mechanical legs there protruded from the object’s main body a
bulbous contraption (Fig. 61).

What were these objects? Were they the “Whirlwinds” of the
Near Eastern texts (including the Old Testament), the “Flying
Saucers” of the Anunnaki? The murals, the circular pits, the bands
of ashes, the strewn, blackened pebbles, the location of the place-
all that was uncovered and probably much that was not— bespeak
Tell Ghassul as a stronghold and supply depot for the patrol aircraft
of the Anunnaki.

The Tell Ghassul/Jericho crossing point played important and
miraculous roles in several biblical events, a fact that may have en-
hanced the Vatican’s interest in the site. It was there that the
prophet Elijah crossed the river (to its eastern bank) in order to
keep an appointment— at Tell Ghassul?— to be taken aloft by “a
chariot of fire . . . in a Whirlwind.” It was in that area that at the
end of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt, Moses (having been de-
nied by the Lord entty into Canaan proper) “went up from the
plain of Moab”— the area of Tell Ghassul— “unto the Mount of
Nebo, to its uppermost peak, which overlooked Jericho; and the
Lord showed him all the land: the Gilead up to Dan, and the land of
Naphtali and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh and the whole
land of Judea, unto the Mediterranean; and the Negeb and the plain
valley of Jericho, the city of datepalms.” It is a description of a

Peace on Earth 191

view as encompassing as that seen by the archaeologists who stood
atop Tell Ghassul.

The crossing itself, under the leadership of Joshua, entailed the
miraculous backing up of the Jordan’s waters, under the influence
of the Holy Ark and its contents. It was then, “when Joshua was
by Jericho, that he raised his eyes and Io and behold, there stood a
man opposite him and his drawn sword in his hand; and Joshua
wept unto him and said unto him: ‘Art thou with us or with our ene-
mies?’ and he said: ‘Neither; a captain of the host of the Lord am
I.’ And Joshua fell on his face to the ground and bowed, and said
unto him: ‘What sayeth my lord unto his servant?’ and the captain
of the host of Yahweh said unto Joshua: ‘Remove thy shoe off thy
foot, for the place where thou standeth is restricted.’ ”

Then the captain of the troops of Yahweh divulged to him the
Lord’s plan for the conquest of Jericho. Do not attempt to storm its
walls by force, he said. Instead, carry the Ark of the Covenant around
its walls seven times. And on the seventh day the priests sounded the
tmmpets, and the people let out a great cry, as they were commanded.
“And the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.”

Jacob, too, crossing the Jordan at night on his return to Canaan
from Harran, ran into “a man” and the two wrestled till dawn;
only then did Jacob realize that his opponent was a deity; “and Ja-
cob called the place Peni-El (‘The Face of God’) for I had seen a
god face to face and have survived.”

Indeed, the Old Testament clearly states that there had been in
earlier times settlements of the Anunnaki at the vital approaches to
the Sinai peninsula and Jerusalem. Hebron, the city guarding the
route between Jerusalem and the Sinai, “was called earlier Kiryat
Arba (“Stronghold of Arba”); a Great Man (“king”) among the
Anakim he was” (Joshua, 14: 15). The descendants of the Anakim,
we are further told, were still residing in the area during the Isra-
elite conquest of Canaan; and there are numerous other biblical ref-
erences to abodes of the Anakim on the east side of the Jordan.

Who were these Anakim? The term is commonly translated
“giants,” just as the biblical term Nefilim had been translated. But
we have already shown conclusively that by Nefilim (“Those
Who Had Come Down”) the Old Testament had referred to the
“People of the Rocketships.”

The Anakim, we suggest, were none other than the Anunnaki.

No one had hitherto paid any particular attention to the count of
3,650 years which Manetho assigned to the reign of the “demi-

192

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

gods” who belonged to the dynasty of Thoth. We, however, find
the figure highly significant, for it differs but by 50 years from the
3,600-year orbit of Nibiru, the home planet of the Anunnaki.

It was no accident, we have maintained, that mankind’s ad-
vancement from the Stone Age to the high civilization of Sumer oc-
curred in 3,600-year intervals— circa 1 1 ,000, 7400, and 3800 b.c.
It was as though “a mysterious hand” had each time “picked
Man out of his decline and raised him to an even higher level of
culture, knowledge and civilization,” we wrote in The 12th
Planet; each instance, we hold, coincided with the recurrence
of the time when the Anunnaki could come and go between
Earth and Nibiru.

These advances spread from the Mesopotamian nucleus through-
out the ancient world; and the Egyptian “Age of the demigods”
(offspring of the cohabitation of gods and humans)— from circa
7100 b.c. to 3450 b.c. per Manetho — unquestionably coincides
with the Neolithic period in Egypt.

We can assume that at each of these intervals the fate of man-
kind and the gods’ relations with it were discussed by the Great An-
unnaki, the “seven who decree.” We know for sure that such a de-
liberation had taken place prior to the sudden and otherwise
inexplicable blooming of the Sumerian civilization, for the Sume-
rians have left us records of such discussions!

When the reconstruction of Sumer began, first to have been re-
built on its soil were the Olden Cities but no longer as exclusive
Cities of the Gods; for mankind was now allowed into these urban
centers to tend the surrounding fields, orchards, and cattlefolds in
behalf of the gods, and to be in the service of the gods in all con-
ceivable manners: not only as cooks and bakers, artisans and cloth-
iers, but also as priests, musicians, entertainers, and temple prosti-
tutes.

First to be reestablished was Eridu. Having been Enki’s first set-
tlement on Earth, it was given to him anew in perpetuity. His initial
shrine there (Fig. 62)— a marvel of architecture in those early
days— was in time raised and expanded to a magnificent temple-
abode, the E.EN.GUR.RA (“House of the Lord Whose Return Is
Triumphant”), adorned with gold, silver, and precious metals
from the Lower World and protected by the “Bull of Heaven.” For
Enlil and Ninlil Nippur was reestablished; there they raised a new
Ekur (“Mountain House”— Fig. 63), this time equipped not as
Mission Control Center but with awesome weapons: “the Lifted
Eye which scans the land”; and “the Lifted Beam,” which pene-

Fig. 62

trates all. Their sacred area also housed Enid's “fast-stepping
Bird” whose “grasp no one could escape.”

A “Hymn to Eridu” edited and translated by A. Falkenstein
(Sumer, vol. VII) describes how Enki traveled to attend a gathering
of all the great gods; the occasion was a visit by Anu to Earth, for
one of those deliberations that determined the fate of gods and men
on Earth every 3,000 years. After some celebrating, when “the
gods the intoxicating beverage had drunk, the wine prepared by
men,” it was time for solemn decisions. “Anu sat on the seat of
honor; near him sat Enlil; Ninharsag sat on an arm chair.”

Anu called the meeting to order, “and to the Anunnaki thus
said”:

Great gods who had hither come,

Annuna-gods, who to the Court of Assembly had come!

My son had for himself a House built;

The lord Enki

Eridu like the mountain on Earth he raised;

His House, in a beautiful place he built.

To the place, Eridu, no one uninvited can enter . . .

In its sanctuary, from the Abzu

the Divine Formulas Enki had deposited.

This brought the deliberations to the main item on the agenda:

Fig. 63

EnliPs complaint that Enki was withholding from the other gods
the “Divine Formulas”— the knowledge of more than one hundred
aspects of civilization— confining advancement to Eridu and its
people only. (It is an archaeologically confirmed fact that Eridu
was Sumer’s oldest post-Diluvial city, the fountainhead of Sume-
rian civilization.) It was then decided that Enki must share the
Divine Formulas with the other gods, so that they, too, could
establish and reestablish their urban centers: civilization was to be
granted to the whole of Sumer.

When the official part of the deliberations was over, the gods
who were on Earth had a surprise for the celestial visitors: midway
between Nippur and Eridu they had built a sacred precinct in honor

m

Peace on Earth 195

of Anu; an abode appropriately named E. ANNA— “House of
Anu.”

Before they left Earth back for the Home Planet, Anu and Antu
his spouse paid an overnight visit to their Earthly temple; it was an
occasion marked by pomp and circumstance. As the divine couple
reached the new town— later to be known as Uruk (the biblical
Erech)— the gods accompanied them in a procession to the tem-
ple’s courtyard. While a sumptuous evening meal was prepared,
Anu, seated on a throne, chatted with the male gods; Antu, accom-
panied by the female goddesses, changed her clothes in the tem-
ple’s section called “House of the Golden Bed.’’

Priests and other temple attendants served “wine and good oil”
and slaughtered in sacrifice “a bull and a ram for Anu, Antu and all
the gods. ’ ’ But the banquet was delayed until it was dark enough to
see the planets: “Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Mars and the
Moon— as soon as they shall appear.” With this, and after a cere-
monial washing of the hands, the first part of the meal was served:
“Bull meat, ram meat, fowl ... as well as prime beer and pressed
wine.”

A pause was then made for the highlight of the evening. While
one group of priests began to chant the hymn ‘ ‘Kakkab Anu etellu
shamame, ” “The Planet of Anu Rises in the Skies,” a priest went
up to the “topmost stage of the tower of the temple” to watch the
skies for the appearance of the Planet of Anu, Nibiru. At the ex-
pected moment and in the predetermined spot in the heavens,
the planet was sighted. Thereupon the priests broke out in sing-
ing the compositions “To the One Who Grows Bright, the
Heavenly Planet of the Lord Anu” and “The Creator’s Image
Has Arisen.” A bonfire was lit in signal, and as the news
spread from one observation post to another, bonfires were lit in
one place after another. Before the night was over, the whole
land was alight.

In the morning, prayers of thanksgiving were offered in the tem-
ple’s chapel, and in a sequence filled with ceremony and symbol-
ism, the celestial visitors began their departure. “Anu is leaving,”
the priests chanted; “Anu, great king of Heaven and Earth, we ask
for your blessing,” they intoned. After Anu gave the asked-for
blessings, the procession wound its way down the “Street of the
Gods” to the “Place of the barque of Anu.” There were more
prayers and hymn singing at a chapel called “Build Life on
Earth.” Now it was time for those remaining behind to bless the
departing couple, and the following verses were recited:

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

19 ^

Great Anu, may Heaven and Earth bless you!

May the gods Enlil, Ea and Ninmah bless you!

May the gods Sin and Shamash bless you . . .

May the gods Nergal and Ninurta bless you . . .

May the Igigi who are in heaven

and the Anunnaki who are on Earth, bless you!

May the gods of the Abzu

and the gods of the holy land bless you!

And then Anu and Antu took off to the Spaceport. It was the sev-
enteenth day of their visit to Earth, a tablet found in the archives of
Uruk states. The momentous visit was over.

Its decisions opened the way for the establishment of new cities
besides the Olden Ones. First and foremost among them was Kish.
It was put under the control of Ninurta, “Enlil’s Foremost Son”;
he turned it into Sumer’s first administrative capital. For Nan-
nar/Sin, ‘‘Enlil’s Firstborn,” the new urban center of Ur (“The
City”) was established— a place that was to become Sumer’s eco-
nomic heart.

There were additional decisions concerning the new era in man-
kind’s advancement and its relations with the Anunnaki. We read
in the Sumerian texts, concerning the crucial conclave that
launched Sumer’s great civilization, that “the great Anunnaki who
decree the fate” decided that the gods “were too lofty for Man-
kind.” The term used — elu in Akkadian — means exactly that:
“Lofty Ones”; from it comes the Babylonian, Assyrian, Hebrew,
and Ugaritic El — the term to which the Greeks gave the connotation
“god.”

There was a need, the Anunnaki decided, to give mankind
“Kingship” as an intermediary between themselves and the human
citizenry. All the Sumerian records attest that this major decision
was taken during Anu’s visit, at a Council of the Great Gods. One
Akkadian text (the Fable of the Tamarisk and the Datepalm) de-
scribes thus the meeting that had taken place “in long ago days, in
far off times”:

The gods of the land, Anu, Enlil and Enki,

convened an assembly.

Enlil and the gods took counsel;

Among them was seated Shamash;

Among them was seated Ninmah.

Peace on Earth

197

At that time “there was not yet kingship in the land; the rule was
held by the gods.” But the Great Council resolved to change that
and to grant kingship to mankind. All the Sumerian sources agree
that the first royal city was Kish. The men who were appointed by
Enlil to be kings were called LU.GAL, “Mighty Man.” We find
the same record in the Old Testament (Genesis chapter 10): when
mankind was establishing its kingdoms:

Kish begot Nimrod;

He was the first to be a Mighty Man in the Land . . .

And the beginning of his kingship:

Babel and Erech and Akkad,
all in the land of Shin’ar [Sumer],

While the biblical text names the first three capitals as Kish,
Babylon, and Erech, the Sumerian King Lists assert that Kingship
moved from Kish to Erech and then to Ur, omitting any mention of
Babylon. The apparent discrepancy has a reason: We believe it has
to do with the incident of the Tower of Babel (Babylon), which the
Old Testament records in no small detail. It was an incident, we
believe, that had to do with Marduk’s insistence that he, rather than
Nannar, should possess Sumer’s next capital. The time was clearly
during the resettlement of the plain of Sumer (the biblical Shin’ar),
when new urban centers were being built:

And as they travelled from the east,
they found a valley in the Land of Shin’ar
and settled there.

And they said unto one another:

“Let us make bricks, and bum them by fire”;
and the brick served them as stone,
and the bitumen served them as mortar.

It was then that the scheme which caused the incident was sug-
gested by an unnamed instigator: “Come, let us build us a city,
and a tower whose head shall reach the heavens.”

“And Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower which
the humans were building”; and he said to unnamed colleagues:
“This is just the beginning of their undertakings; from now on, any-
thing that they shall scheme to do shall no longer be impossible for
them.” And Yahweh said to his colleagues: “Come, let us go down
and confuse their language, so that they would not understand each

198

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

other’s speech.” Then the Lord “scattered them from there all over
the face of the Earth, and they ceased to build the city.”

That there was initially a time when mankind “spoke in unison”
is a tenet of Sumerian historical recollections. These also assert
that the confusion of languages, accompanying the dispersion of
mankind, was a deliberate act of the gods. Like the Old Testament,
the writings of Berossus reported that “the gods introduced a diver-
sity of tongues among men, who until that time had all spoken the
same language.” Like the biblical tale, the histories of Berossus
connect the diversification of languages and the dispersion of man-
kind to the incident of the Tower of Babel: “When all men for-
merly spoke the same language, some among them undertook to
erect a large and lofty tower, that they might climb up to heaven.
But the Lord, sending forth a whirlwind, confounded their design,
and gave to each tribe a particular language of its own.”

The conformity of the tales suggests the existence of a common,
older source from which both the compilers of the Old Testament
and Berossus had obtained their information. Although it is gener-
ally assumed that such an original text has not yet been found, the
fact is that George Smith, in his very first publication in 187$, re-
ported discovering at Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh “a muti-
lated account of part of the story of the Tower.” The tale, he con-
cluded, was originally written on two tablets; on the one he had
found (K-3657), there had been six columns of cuneiform text; but
he could piece together only fragments of four columns. It is un-
doubtedly an Akkadian version of the Sumerian tale of the Tower
of Babel; and it is clear from it that the incident was brought about
not by mankind but by the gods themselves. Mankind was only a
pawn in the struggle.

As pieced together by Geoige Smith, and retranslated by W. S. C.
Boscawen in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archae-
ology (vol. V), the tale began with the identification of the instiga-
tor; damage to the lines, however, obliterated the name. “The
thoughts” of this god’s heart “were evil; against the Father of the
Gods [Enlil] he was wicked.” To achieve his evil purpose “the
people of Babylon he corrupted to sin,” inducing “small and great
to mingle on the mound.”

As the sinful work came to the attention of “the lord of the Pure
Mound”— already identified as Enlil in the Cattle and Grain tale—
Enlil “to Heaven and on Earth spoke. ... He lifted his heart to
the Lord of the Gods, Anu, his father; to receive a command his
heart requested. At that time he also lifted up [his heart? voice?] to

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199

Damkina.” We well know that she was the mother of Marduk; so
all the clues point to him as the instigator. But Damkina stood by
his side: “With my son I rise . . she said. The incomplete verse
that follows has her stating that “his number”— his numerical
rank-status? — was at issue.

The legible portion of column III then deals with Enid's efforts
to talk the rebellious group out of their plans. Taking himself up in
a Whirlwind, “Nunamnir [Enlil] from the heaven to earth spoke;
[but] by his path they did not go; violently they fronted against
him.” When Enlil “saw this, to earth he descended.” But even his
very presence on the site did not make a difference. We read in the
last column that “when a stop he did not make of the gods,” he
had no choice but to resort to force:

To their stronghold tower, in the night,

a complete end he made.

In his anger, a command he also poured out:

To scatter abroad was his decision.

He gave a command their counsels to confuse.

. . . their course he stopped.

The ancient Mesopotamian scribe ended the tale of the Tower of
Babel with a bitter memory: Because they “against the gods re-
volted with violence, violently they wept for Babylon; very much
they wept.”

The biblical version also names Babel (Hebrew for Babylon) as
the place where the incident had occurred. The name is significant,
for in its original Akkadian — Bab-Ili — it meant “Gateway of the
Gods,” the place by which the gods were to enter and leave Sumer.

It was there, the biblical narrative states, that the perpetrators
planned to construct ‘ ‘a tower whose head shall reach unto the heav-
ens.” The words are identical to the actual name of the ziggurat
(seven-stage pyramid) which was the dominant feature of ancient Bab-
ylon (Fig. 64): E.SAG.ILA, “House Whose Head is Lofty.”

The biblical and the Mesopotamian texts— undoubtedly based
on an original Sumerian chronicle — thus relate the same incident:
Marduk’s frustrated attempt to prevent the transfer of kingship
from Kish to Erech and Ur— cities destined to be power centers of
Nannar/Sin and his children— and to seize suzerainty for his own
city, Babylon.

By this attempt, however, Marduk started a chain of events re-
plete with tragedies.

Peace on Earth

201

▲ Spac«-r«lat*4 Faciiltia*

10

THE PRISONER
IN THE PYRAMID

The incident of the Tower of Babel brought to an unexpected end
the longest era of Peace on Earth that Man can recall. The chain of
tragic events the incident had triggered had, we believe, a direct
bearing on the Great Pyramid and its mysteries. To resolve them
we shall offer our own theory of how this unique structure had been
planned and constructed, then plugged and broken into.

To the many enigmas pertaining to the construction and purpose
of the Great Pyramid at Giza, two more were added after its com-
pletion. All theories concerning them, having been based on the as-
sumption of a royal burial as the pyramid’s purpose, have been
found flawed and wanting. We believe that the answers lie not in
the tales of the Pharaohs, but in the tales of the gods.

Several references to the Great Pyramid in writings of classical
Greek and Roman chroniclers attest to familiarity in their times
with the swivel-stone entrance into the pyramid, the Descending
Passage and the Subterranean Pit. There was no knowledge of the
whole upper system of passages, galleries, and chambers, because
the Ascending Passage was plugged tight with three large granite
blocks and further camouflaged with a triangular stone, so that no
one going down the Descending Passage ever suspected that there
existed a junction with an upper passage (Fig. 65).

Over the many centuries that followed, even the knowledge of
the original entrance was forgotten; and when (in a.d. 820) the Ca-
liph A1 Mamoon decided to enter the pyramid, his men forced an
entry by tunneling aimlessly through the masonry. Only when they
heard a stone fall somewhere inside the pyramid did they tunnel in
the direction of the sound, reaching the Descending Passage. The
stone that had fallen was the triangular stone hiding the junction
with the Ascending Passage; its fall revealed the granite plug. Un-
able even to dent the granite blocks, the men cut through the lime-
stone masonry around them, discovering the Ascending Passage
and the upper inner parts of the pyramid. As the Arab historians at-

202

L

Fig. 65

test, everywhere A1 Mamoon and his men found nothing but empti-
ness.

Clearing the Ascending Passage of debris— pieces of limestone
that had somehow slid down the passage to the granite plugs— they
crawled up to the upper end of this passage. Coming out of its
squarelike tunnel, they could stand up, for they had reached the
junction of the Ascending Passage with- a Horizontal Passage and
with the Grand Gallery (Fig. 66). They followed the Horizontal
Passage, reaching the vaulted chamber at its end (which later ex-
plorers named the “Queen’s Chamber”); it was bare, and so was
its enigmatic niche (see Fig. 49). Returning to the junction of the
passages, they clambered up the Grand Gallery (Fig. 45); its pre-
cisely cut grooves, now empty holes and nooks, helped the climb
up— a task made slippery by a layer of white dust that covered the
Gallery’s floor and ramps. They climbed over the Great Step,
which rose from the upper end of the Gallery to become flush with
the floor of the Antechamber; entering it, they found its blocking
portcullises gone (Fig. 67). They crawled into the upper vaulted
chamber (later named the “King’s Chamber”); it was bare, except
for a hollowed-out stone block (nicknamed “The Coffer”), but it,
too, was empty.

Returning to the junction of the three passages (Ascending Pas-
sage, Grand Galleiy, and Horizontal Passage), A1 Mamoon’s men

iMN

204

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

205

The Prisoner in the Pyramid

noticed a gaping hole on the western side, where the ramp stone be-
longing there had been smashed away (Fig. 68). It led via a short
horizontal passage to a vertical shaft, which the Arabs assumed
was a well. As they clambered down this “well shaft" (as it came
to be called), they found that it was but the upper part of a long
(about 200 feet) series of twisting and turning connected shafts that
ended with a six-foot link to the Descending Passage and thus pro-
vided a connection between the pyramid’s upper chambers and
passages and its lower ones (Fig. 66). The evidence indicates that
the lower opening was blocked up and hidden from whoever had
come down the Descending Passage, until A1 Mamoon’s men low-
ered themselves through the length of the Well Shaft and discov-
ered and broke open its bottom end.

The Arabs’ discoveries and later investigations have raised a
host of puzzles. Why, when, and by whom was the Ascending Pas-
sage plugged up? Why, when, and by whom was the twisting Well
Shaft tunneled through the pyramid and its rocky base?

206 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The first and most persistent theory fitted the two puzzles into
one answer. Holding that the pyramid was built by the Pharaoh
Khufu (Cheops) to be his tomb, the theory suggested that after his
mummified body was placed in the “Coffer” in the “King’s
Chamber,” workmen slid the three granite plug blocks from the
Grand Gallery down the slope of the Ascending Passage, in order
to seal off the tomb. This entrapped these workmen alive in the
Grand Gallery. Outwitting the priests, the workmen removed the
end stone in the ramp, dug out the Well Shaft, reached the De-
scending Passage, and saved themselves by climbing up it to the
pyramid’s entrance/exit.

But this theory does not stand up to critical scrutiny.

The Well Shaft is made up of seven distinct segments (Fig. 66).
It begins with the upper horizontal segment (A) leading from the
Grand Gallery to a vertical segment (£), which connects via a
twisting segment C with a lower vertical segment D. A long,
straight, but sharply inclined segment E then follows, leading into
a shorter segment F inclined at a different angle. At the end of F, a
segment intended to be horizontal but, in fact, slightly slanting (G)
then connects the Well Shaft with the Descending Passage. Apart
from the connecting, horizontal segments A and G, the Well Shaft
proper (segments B, C, D, E, and F), in spite of its changing of
courses when viewed on a north-south plane, lies precisely on an
east-west plane parallel to the pyramid’s plane of passages and
chambers; the separating distance of about six feet is bridged at the
top by segment A and at the bottom by segment G.

While the three upper segments of the Well Shaft traverse some
sixty feet through the pyramid’s limestone masonry, the lower seg-
ments were cut through some 150 feet of solid rock. The few work-
men left behind to slide down the granite plugs (according to the
above-mentioned theory) could not have been able to cut through
the rock. Also, if the digging was from above, where is all the
debris, which they could have only brought up as they dug down?
With the Well Shaft’s twenty-eight-inch bore through most of its
segments, the more than one thousand cubic feet of debris would
have piled up in the upper passages and chambers.

In view of these improbabilities, new theories were advanced
based on an assumption that the Well Shaft was dug from the bot-
tom up (the debris was then removed via the Descending Passage
to outside the pyramid). But why? The answer is: an accident. As
the Pharaoh was being entombed, an earthquake shook the pyra-
mid, loosening prematurely the granite plugs. As a result, not mere

207

The Prisoner in the Pyramid

laborers, but members of the royal family and high priests, were
trapped alive. With the pyramid’s plans still available, rescue
teams tunneled their way up, reached the Grand Gallery, and saved
the dignitaries.

This theory (as well as a long-discarded one about grave robbers
digging their way up) falters, among other points, on the matter of
precision. With the exception of segment C, which was tunneled
through the masonry in a rough and irregular manner, and section
G, two of whose squarish sides were left rough and not quite hori-
zontal, all the other segments are straight, precise, carefully fin-
ished, and uniformly angled throughout their lengths. Why would
rescue workers (or grave robbers) waste time to achieve perfection
and precision? Why would they bother to smooth the sides, when
such smoothness made climbing the shaft much more difficult?

As the evidence mounted that no Pharaoh had ever been buried
or enshrined within the Great Pyramid, a new theory gained adher-
ents: The Well Shaft was cut to enable an examination of fissures
that had developed in the rock as a result of an earthquake. The
most articulate proponents of such a theory were the brothers John
and Morton Edgar (The Great Pyramid Passages and Chambers),
who, motivated by a religious zeal which saw in the pyramid an ex-
pression in stone of biblical prophecies, visited, cleared, exam-
ined, measured, and photographed every known part of the
pyramid. They showed conclusively that the upper short horizontal
passage to the Well Shaft (A), as well as the uppermost vertical sec-
tion (£), were part and parcel of the original construction of the
pyramid (Fig. 69). They also found that the lower vertical section
(. D ) was carefully built with masonry blocks as it passed through a
cavity (nicknamed The Grotto) in the bedrock (Fig. 70); it could
have been so constructed only when the rock face was still ex-
posed, before the Grotto was covered up with the masonry of the
pyramid. In other words, this section, too, had to be part— a very
early part— of the original construction of the pyramid.

As the pyramid was rising above its base— so the Edgars theo-
rized— a massive earthquake fissured the bedrock in several places.
Needing to know the extent of the damage to determine whether the
pyramid could still rise above the cracked bedrock, the builders cut
through the rock segments E and F as Inspection Shafts. Finding the
damage not too serious, the pyramid’s construction continued; but to
allow periodic inspection, a short (about six-foot) passage (G) was
tunneled from the Descending Passage to connect with section F, al-
lowing entry into the Inspection Shafts from below.

The Prisoner in the Pyramid

209

A

Fig. 70

Though the theories of the Edgars (further expounded by Adam
Rutherford in Pyramidology) have been adopted by all such pyra-
midologists as well as by some Egyptologists, they still fall short of
solving the enigmas. If the long sections E and F were emergency
Inspection Shafts— why their precise and time-consuming con-
struction? What was the purpose of the original vertical sections B

j

210

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

and D? When and why was the irregular, twisting section C forced
through the masonry? And what about the granite plugs: Why were
they needed if there had been no funeral and no burial? To these
questions there has been no satisfactory answer, neither by pyra-
midologists nor by Egyptologists.

Yet the arduous and zealous measuring and remeasuring by both
groups hold the key to the answers: the essential segments of the
Well Shaft, we believe, were indeed executed by the original
builders, but neither as an afterthought nor in response to an emer-
gency. They were, rather, the fruit of forethought: features in-
tended to serve as architectural guidelines in the construction of the
pyramid.

Much has already been written over the centuries of the Great
Pyramid’s wonderful proportions and remarkable geometric ratios.
However, because all other pyramids have only lower inner pas-
sages and chambers, the tendency has persisted to view the whole
upper system as a later-phase development. As a result, little atten-
tion was paid to certain alignments between upper and lower fea-
tures of the pyramid, which can be accounted for only if the upper
and lower parts were planned and executed at one and the same
time. Thus, for example, the point at the Grand Gallery where the
floor rises abruptly to form the Great Step Up (C7), the central axis
of the “Queen’s Chamber” (Q), and a Recess (/?) at the lowest
short horizontal passage — are all placed exactly on one line, the
pyramid’s center line. Also, an enigmatic Down Step ( S ) in the up-
per Horizontal Passage is aligned with the point marking the end
(P) of the Descending Passage. And there are more such puzzling
alignments, as our next diagram will show.

Were all these alignments coincidences, architectural freaks— or
the result of careful planning and layout? As we shall now show,
these and other hitherto unrecognized alignments flowed from the
ingenious, yet simple, planning of the pyramid. And we will also
prove that the original segments of the Well Shaft were integral ele-
ments not only in the execution but also in the veiy planning of the
pyramid.

Let us begin with segment D, because we believe that it was the
very first one. It is now generally agreed that the rocky knoll on
which the pyramid was erected was flattened out in a stepped man-
ner. The lowest face of the rock (which can be seen outside)
formed the Base Line; the uppermost face of the rock is at the
Grotto level; there, the bottom layer (“course”) of the pyramid’s
masonry can be seen. Since segment D lies below this masonry, it

211

The Prisoner in the Pyramid

had to be cut and fashioned through the Grotto and the bedrock be-
fore anything above it was constructed; i.e., before the Well Shaft
segments A, B, and C. Because the only way to tunnel through the
rock is from its exposed face downward, segment E, which begins
its downward slope precisely from the end of D, could have been
cut only after segment D was completed; F had to follow E, and G
came last.

In other words, D must have been constructed with great preci-
sion (see Fig. 70), through the Grotto and the rock, before all the
other segments of the Well Shaft. But why was it located where it
is; why is it precisely vertical; why did it not continue all the way
up but was made of the length of which it is?

Why, for that matter— a fact that has gone completely unno-
ticed— is segment E inclined to D and to the Base Line at the pre-
cise angle of 45°? And why, if E was meant to serve as a
connecting shaft, did it not simply continue until it reached the De-
scending Passage but instead turned at an angle to become segment
F? And why is this segment, F— another unnoticed feature-
inclined to the Ascending Passage at the precise right angle of 90°?

To answer these questions we have asked ourselves: How did
the pyramid’s architects design and achieve these symmetries, per-
fect alignments, and remarkable geometric congruations? The so-
lution we have come up with can best be illustrated by a drawing
(Fig. 71); it is a layout plan of the pyramid’s insides, prepared by
us— we believe— as it might have been drawn by the pyramid’s
own builders: a simple, yet ingenious, architectural plan that
achieves the impressive symmetry, alignments, and perfection
with the aid of a few lines and three circles!

The construction of the pyramid began with the leveling of the
rocky knoll on which it was to rise. To give the structure greater
stability the rock was cut to the Base Level only near the pyramid’s
circumference; at its core the face of the rock was higher, rising in
stages. It was then, we believe, that the Grotto— a natural deform-
ity in the rock or perhaps an artificial cavity — was selected as the
point where the structure’s alignments were to begin.

There, the first of the shafts, D, was placed vertically through
the Grotto— partly cut through the rock and partly built with ma-
sonry blocks (see Fig. 70). Its height (see Fig. 71) delineates pre-
cisely the distance from the Base Level to the level where the rock
ends and the masonry begins at the pyramid’s core.

It has been long recognized that the value Tr —the factor governing
the ratios between a circle or a sphere, its linear elements and its

213

The Prisoner in the Pyramid

area projections— has been employed in determining the circumfer-
ence, sides, and height of the pyramid. As our drawing clearly
shows, not only the pyramid’s envelope but also everything inside
it was determined with the aid of three equal circles.

Theodolitic equipment placed within shaft D beamed upward a
key vertical line whose function we shall soon describe. But first
this equipment beamed out the horizontal rock/masonry line, on
which the centers of the three circles were placed. The first of these
(Point 1) was at D; Points 2 and 3, where its circle intersected the
line, served as centers for the other two, overlapping circles.

To draw these circles the pyramid’s architects, of course, had to
decide on the proper radius. Researchers of the Great Pyramid have
been long frustrated by the inability to apply to its perfect propor-
tions any of the ancient Egyptian units of measurement— neither
the common cubit of 24 fingers nor the Royal cubit of 28 fingers
(20.63" or 525 millimeters). Some three centuries ago Sir Isaac
Newton concluded that an enigmatic “Sacred Cubit’’ of some
25.2" was used not only in the construction of the pyramid but also
in the construction of Noah’s Ark and the temple in Jerusalem.
Both Egyptologists and pyramidologists now accept this conclu-
sion as far as the pyramid is concerned. Our own calculations show
that the radius adopted for the three circles envisioned by us was
equal to 60 such Sacred Cubits; the number 60 being, not acciden-
tally, the base number of the Sumerian sexagesimal mathematical
system. This measure of 60 Sacred Cubits is dominant in the
lengths and heights of the pyramid’s inner structure as well as in
the dimensions of its base.

Having selected the radius, the three circles were drawn; and
now the pyramid began to take shape: where the second circle in-
tersected the Base Level (Point 4), the pyramid’s side was to rise at
the angle of 52°— a perfect angle because it is the only one which
incorporates the tr ratios into the pyramid.

From the bottom of shaft D, shaft E was then tunneled down,
precisely inclined at 45° to D. The theodolite-beam projected from
E upward, intersecting circle 2 at Point 5, provided the sloping line
for the pyramid’s side and also marked off the half-area Level, on
which the King’s Chamber and the Antechamber were to be placed
(the 5-U-K line) and the Grand Gallery was to end. Projected
downwards, the E slope determined point P at which the Descend-
ing Passage was to end, and the vertical line from P determined the
Down Step S in the upper Horizontal Passage.

Turning to the third circle, we see that its center (Point 3)

214

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

marked the vertical center line of the pyramid. Where it intersected
the half-area Line, the Great Up Step (U) was placed, marking the
end of the Grand Gallery and the beginning of the King’s Chamber
floor. It also determined the position of the Queen’s Chamber ( Q ),
which was placed exactly on the center line. By connecting Point 2
with Point U, the floor line of the Ascending Passage and the
Grand Gallery was obtained.

Shaft F was then tunneled from the end of the shaft E, precisely
so that its beam intersected the ascending floor line 2-U at a right
angle (90°). From its intersection with the first circle (Point 6), a
line was drawn through Point 2, all the way up to the side of the
pyramid (Point 7). This delineated the Descending Passage, its
junction with the Ascending Passage (at Point 2), and the entrance
to the pyramid.

The shafts D, E, and Fand the three circles have thus made
possible most of the essential features of the Great Pyramid.
Still undetermined, however, were the points at which the As-
cending Passage would end and the Grand Gallery begin and,
accordingly, where the level of the Horizontal Passage to the
Queen’s Chamber would be. Here was, we believe, where shaft
B came into play. No one has so far pointed out the fact that its
length is precisely equal to that of D and that it marks off ex-
actly the distance between the Entrance Level and the level of
the Horizontal Passage. B was placed where the Ascending
Line intersected circle 2 (Point 8). Its vertical extension marks
the beginning of the rising wall of the Grand Gallery; the dis-
tance from Point 8 to Point 9, where the beam from D intersects
the horizontal line from 8, is the place of the grandiose intersec-
tion depicted in Fig. 68.

Segment B, connected at Point 8 to the passages through the
short level segment A, thus enabled the pyramid’s builders to com-
plete it inside. When that was done, there was no longer any archi-
tectural or functional use for these segments, and the entrance to
them was covered by placing there a well-fitting, wedge-shaped
ramp stone (Fig. 72).

Segments D, E, and F have also disappeared from view as the
pyramid’s masomy rose over the rocky base. It was then, perhaps,
the function of the less precisely built segment G to enable the
withdrawal of the beaming-theodolites from the D-E-F segments,
or to make last-minute checks. Finally, where the Descending Pas-
sage connected with this segment G, the opening was covered with

The Prisoner in the Pyramid

215

Fig. 72

a well-fitting stone block; and these lower segments, too, disap-
peared from view.

The pyramid stood complete, with all the segments of the Well
Shaft in their hidden places; all, that is, except one, which as we
have shown had absolutely no function or purpose in the pyramid’s
planning and construction.

The exception is the irregular and uncharacteristic segment C,
unevenly twisting through the masonry, rudely, crudely, and forc-
ibly cut through the limestone courses in a manner that left many
stone blocks broken and protruding. When, why, and how did this
enigmatic section, C, come into being?

That section, we believe, was not yet in existence when the pyr-
amid was completed by its constructors. It was, we will show, hur-
riedly forced through later on, when Marduk was imprisoned alive
in the Great Pyramid.

That Marduk was imprisoned alive in the “Mountain Tomb,”
there is no doubt; texts that have been found and authoritatively
translated attest to that. Other Mesopotamian texts throw light on

216

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

the nature of his offense. All together they enable us to arrive at a
plausible reconstruction of the events.

Evicted from Babylon and Mesopotamia, Marduk returned to
Egypt. He promptly established himself in Heliopolis, enhancing
its role as his “cult center” by assembling his celestial memora-
bilia in a special shrine, to which Egyptians made pilgrimages for a
long time thereafter.

But seeking to reestablish his hegemony over Egypt, Marduk
found that things had changed since he left Egypt to attempt his
coup d’etat in Mesopotamia. Though Thoth, we gather, did not put
up a struggle for supremacy, and Nergal and Gibil were far from
the center of power, a new rival had emerged in the interim: Dumu-
zi. That younger son of Enki, his domain bordering Upper Egypt,
was emerging as a pretender to the throne of Egypt.

And behind his ambitions was none other than his bride
Inanna/Ishtar— another cause for Marduk’s suspicions and dis-
like.

The tale of Dumuzi and Inanna— he a son of Enki, she a grand-
daughter of Enlil— reads like an ancient tale of Romeo and Juliet.
Like Shakespeare’s drama, it, too, ended in tragedy, death, and re-
venge.

The first presence of Inanna/Ishtar in Egypt is mentioned in the
Edfu text dealing with the First Pyramid War. Called there Ashto-
reth (her Canaanite name), she is said to have appeared on the bat-
tlefield among the advancing forces of Homs. The reason for this
inexplicable presence in Egypt might have been to visit her
bridegroom Dumuzi, through whose district the fighting force was
passing. That Inanna had gone to visit Dumuzi (“The Herder”) in
his faraway rural district, we know from a Sumerian text. It tells us
how Dumuzi stood awaiting her arrival and echoes his reassuring
words to a bride baffled by a future in a foreign land:

The young lad stood waiting;

Dumuzi pushed open the door.

Like a moonbeam she came forth to him . . .

He looked at her, rejoiced in her,

Took her in his arms and kissed her.

The Herder put his arm around the maiden;

“I have not carried you off into slavery,” [he said];

“Your table will be a splendid table,

the splendid table where I myself eat . . .”

217

The Prisoner in the Pyramid

At that time Inanna/Ishtar had the blessing of her parents,
Nannar/Sin and Ningal, as well as of her brother Utu/Shamash, to
the Romeo-and-Juliet love match between a granddaughter of Enlil
and a son of Enki. Some brothers of Dumuzi, and probably Enki
himself, also gave their consent. They presented Inanna with a gift
of lapis lazuli, the blue-hued precious stone she cherished. As a
surprise they hid beads and squares of the stone under a heap of her
favorite fruit: dates. In the bedroom she found “a bed of gold,
adorned with lapis lazuli, which Gibil had refined for her in the
abode of Nergal.”

And then the fighting broke out, and brother fought brother. As
long as the fighting was only between the descendants of Enki, no
one saw any particular problem in having a granddaughter of Enlil
around. But after the victory of Horus, when Seth occupied lands
not his, the situation changed completely: The Second Pyramid
War pitched the sons and grandchildren of Enlil against the de-
scendants of Enki. “Juliet” had to be separated from her “Ro-
meo.”

When the lovers were reunited after that war, and their marriage
consummated, they spent many days and nights in bliss and
ecstasy— the subject of numerous Sumerian love songs. But even
as they were making love Inanna was whispering provoking words
to Dumuzi:

As sweet as your mouth are your parts,

they befit a princely status!

Subdue the rebellious country, let the nation multiply;

I will direct the country rightly!

Another time she confessed to him her vision:

I had a vision of a great nation

choosing Dumuzi as God of its country . . .

For I have made Dumuzi’s name exalted,

I gave him status.

With all that it was not a happy union, for it did not produce an
heir— an essential requirement, it appears, for carrying out the di-
vine ambitions. Thus it came to pass that in an attempt to have a
male heir, Dumuzi resorted to a tactic adopted way back by his
own father: he tried to seduce and have intercourse with his own
sister. But whereas in bygone days Ninharsag agreed to Enki’s ad-

218

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

vances, Dumuzi’s sister Geshtinanna refused. In his desperation
Dumuzi violated a sexual taboo: he raped his own sister.

The tragic tale is recorded on a tablet catalogued by scholars as
CT. 15.28-29. The text relates how Dumuzi bade Inanna good-bye
as he announced his plan to go to the desert-plain where his flocks
were. By prearrangement his sister, “the song-knowing sister, was
sitting there.” She thought she was invited for a picnic. As they
were “eating the pure food, dripping with honey and butter, as
they were drinking the fragrant divine beer,” and “were spending
the time in a happy mood . . . Dumuzi took the solemn decision to
do it.” To prepare his sister for what he had in mind, Dumuzi took
a Iamb and copulated it with its mother, then had a kid copulate
with its sister lamb. As the animals were committing incest, Dum-
uzi was touching his sister in emulation, “but his sister still did not
understand.” As Dumuzi’s actions became more and more obvi-
ous, Geshtinanna “screamed and screamed in protest”; but “he
mounted her ... his seed was flowing into her vulva. . . .”
“Halt!” she shouted, “it is a disgrace!” But he did not stop.

Having done his deed, “the Shepherd, being fearless, being
shameless, spoke to his sister.” What he said is unfortunately lost
to us due to breaks in the tablet. But we suspect that he had—
“fearlessly, shamelessly” as the text had stated— gone on to
explain to Geshtinanna the reasons for his deed. That it was pre-
meditated is clear from the text; it is also stated that Inanna was in
on the plan: Dumuzi, prior to leaving, “spoke to her of planning
and advice” and Inanna “to her spouse answered about the plan, to
him she gave her advice.”

Rape, under the moral codes of the Anunnaki, was a serious sex-
ual transgression. In the earliest times, when the first teams of as-
tronauts had landed on Earth, a court-martial sentenced their
supreme commander Enlil to exile for having raped a young nurse
(whom he later married). Dumuzi had surely known all this; so he
either expected his sister to engage in the intercourse willingly or
else had compelling reasons for his deed which overrode the prohi-
bition. Inanna’s prior consent brings to mind the biblical tale of
Abraham and his sonless wife Sarah, who offered him her maid-
servant so that he might have a male heir.

Aware that he had done a horrible deed, Dumuzi was soon there-
after seized with a premonition that he was to pay for his deed with
his life, as told in the Sumerian text SHA.GA.NE. IR IM.SHI—
“His Heart Was Filled With Tears.” Composed in the form of a
self-fulfilling dream, the text relates how Dumuzi fell asleep and

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The Prisoner in the Pyramid

dreamed that all his attributes of status and property were being
taken away from him one by one, by the “Princely Bird” and a fal-
con. The nightmare ended with Dumuzi seeing himself lying dead
in the midst of his sheepfolds.

Waking up, he asked his sister Geshtinanna to tell him the mean-
ing of the dream. “My brother,” she said, “your dream is not fa-
vorable, it is very clear to me.” It foretold “bandits rising against
you from ambush . . . your hands will be bound in handcuffs,
your arms will be bound in fetters.” No sooner had Geshtinanna
finished talking than the evil ones appeared beyond the hill and
caught Dumuzi.

Bound in handcuffs and fetters, Dumuzi cried out an appeal to
Utu/Shamash: “O Utu, you are my brother-in-law, I am your sis-
ter’s husband. . . . Change my hands into a gazelle’s hands,
change my feet into a gazelle’s feet, let me escape the evil ones!”
Hearing his appeal, Utu enabled Dumuzi to escape. After some ad-
ventures Dumuzi sought a hiding place in the house of Old
Belili— a questionable character playing a double role. Dumuzi
was captured again and again escaped. In the end he found himself
hiding once again in the sheepfolds. A strong wind was blowing,
the drinking cups were overturned; the evil ones closed in on him—
all as he had seen in his dream. And in the end;

The drinking cups lay on their side;

Dumuzi was dead.

The sheepfold was thrown into the wind.

The arena of these events, in this text, is a desertlike plain near a
river. The geography is enlarged upon in another version of the
events, a text titled "The Most BitterCry.” Composed as a lament
by Inanna, it tells how seven deputies of Kur entered the sheepfold
and aroused Dumuzi from his sleep. Unlike the previous version,
which simply referred to the seizure of Dumuzi by “evil ones,”
this text makes it clear that they had come on higher authority:
“My master has sent us for you,” the chief deputy announced to
the awakened god. They proceed to strip Dumuzi of his divine at-
tributes:

Take the divine headdress off your head,

get up bareheaded;

Take the royal robe off your body,

get up naked;

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Lay aside the divine staff which is in your hand,

get up empty-handed;

Take the holy sandals off your feet,

get up barefooted!

The seized Dumuzi manages to escape and reaches the river “at
the great dike in the desert of E.MUSH (“Home of the snakes”).
There was only one such place in Egypt, where desert and river
met at a great dike: at the first Nile Cataract, the place where nowa-
days the great dam of Aswan is located.

But the swirling waters did not let Dumuzi reach the other
riverbank where his mother and Inanna were standing by to offer
him protection. Instead “there did the boat-wrecking waters carry
the lad towards Kur; to Kur did the boat-wrecking waters carry the
espoused of Inanna.”

This and other parallel texts reveal that those who had come to
seize Dumuzi were in fact arresting him in accordance with the or-
ders given by a higher god, the Master of Kur, who ‘ ‘a sentence did
pass upon him.” But it could not have been a sentence passed by
the full Assembly of the gods: Enlilite gods, such as Utu/Shamash
and Inanna, were helping Dumuzi escape. The sentence, then, was
one-sided, passed only by the authority of the master of the arrest-
ing deputies. He was none other than Marduk, the elder brother of
both Dumuzi and Geshtinanna.

His identity comes through in the text named by scholars “The
Myths of Inanna and Bilulu.” In it the shady Old Belili turns out to
have been a male, the Lord Bilulu (EN. BILULU) in disguise, and
the very deity who directed the punitive action against Dumuzi.
Akkadian texts dealing with divine epithets explained that En-
Bilulu was il Marduk sha hattati, “the god Marduk who had
sinned,” and “The Sorrower of Inanna.”

Having disapproved of the Dumuzi-Inanna love match from the
beginning, Marduk no doubt was even more opposed to the union
after the Pyramid Wars. The rape of Geshtinanna by Dumuzi—
politically motivated— was thus an opportunity for Marduk to
block the designs Inanna had on Egypt, by seizing and punishing
Dumuzi. Did Marduk intend to put Dumuzi to death? Probably
not; solitary exile was the customary punishment. The death of
Dumuzi, in a manner that has remained unclear, was probably ac-
cidental.

But whether accidental or not was irrelevant to Inanna. As far as

The Prisoner in the Pyramid 221

she was concerned, Marduk had caused her beloved’s death. And,
as the texts make clear, she sought revenge:

What is in holy Inanna’s heart?

To Kill!

To kill the Lord Bilulu.

Working with fragments found in the collections of Mesopota-
mian tablets dispersed in several museums, scholars have pieced
together parts of a text that Samuel N. Kramer (Sumerian Mythol-
ogy) named “Inanna and Ebih.” He considered it as belonging to
the cycle of “slaying-of-the-dragon myths,” for it deals with Inan-
na’s struggle against an evil god hiding inside “The Mountain.”

The available fragments relate how Inanna armed herself with an
array of weapons to attack the god in his hiding place. Though the
other gods tried to dissuade her, she confidently approached The
Mountain, which she called E.BIH (“Abode of Sorrowful Call-
ing”). Haughtily she proclaimed:

Mountain, thou art so high,

thou art elevated above all others . . .

Thou touchest the sky with thy tip . . .

Yet I shall destroy thee,

To the ground I shall fell thee . . .

Inside thine heart pain I will cause.

That The Mountain was the Great Pyramid, that the confronta-
tion was at Giza in Egypt, is evident not only from the texts, but
also from a depiction on a Sumerian cylinder seal (Fig. 73). Inan-
na— shown in her familiar enticing, half-naked pose— is seen con-
fronting a god based upon three pyramids. The pyramids are
depicted exactly as they appear to view in Giza; the Egyptian ankh
sign, the priest in an Egyptian headdress, and the entwined ser-
pents add up to one locale: Egypt.

As Inanna continued to challenge Marduk, now hiding inside the
mighty structure, her fury rose as he ignored her threats. “For the
second time, infuriated by his pride, Inanna approached [the pyra-
mid] again and proclaimed: ‘My grandfather Enlil has permitted
me to enter inside The Mountain!’ ” Flaunting her weapons, she
haughtily announced: “Into the heart of The Mountain I shall
penetrate . . . Inside The Mountain, my victory I shall establish!”
Getting no response, she began her attack:

Fig. 73

She ceased not striking the sides of E-Bih

and all its comers,

even its multitude of raised stones.

But inside ... the Great Serpent who had gone in
his poison ceased not to spit.

Anu himself then intervened. The god hiding inside, he warned
her, possessed awesome weapons; “their outburst is terrible; they
will prevent you from entering.” Instead Anu advised her to seek
justice by putting the hiding god on trial.

The texts amply identify this god. As in the Ninurta texts, he is
called A.ZAG and nicknamed The Great Serpent— a name and a
derogatory Enlilite epithet for Marduk. His hiding place is also
clearly identified as “the E.KUR, whose walls awesomely reach
the skies”— the Great Pyramid.

The record of the trial and sentencing of Marduk is available
from a fragmentary text published by the Babylonian Section of the
Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. The extant lines begin
where the gods had surrounded the pyramid, and a god chosen to
be a spokesman addressed Marduk “in his enclosure”; “the one
who was evil he implored.” Marduk was moved by the message:
“Despite the anger of his heart, clear tears came into his eyes”;
and he agreed to come out and stand trial. The trial was held within
sight of the pyramids, in a temple by the riverbank:

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The Prisoner in the Pyramid

To the place of reverence, by the river,

with him who was accused they stepped.

In truth they made the enemies stand aside.

Justice was performed.

In sentencing Marduk the mystery of Dumuzi’s death posed a
problem. That Marduk was responsible for his death there was no
doubt. But was it premeditated or accidental? Marduk deserved a
death sentence, but what if his crime was not deliberate?

Standing there, in sight of the pyramids, with Marduk fresh out
of his hiding place, the solution dawned on Inanna, and she pro-
ceeded to address the gods:

On this day, the Lady herself.

She who speaks truth,

The accuser of Azag, the great princess,

An awesome judgment uttered.

There was a way to sentence Marduk to death without actually
executing him, she said: Let him be buried alive within the Great
Pyramid! Let him be sealed there as in a gigantic envelope:

In a great envelope that is sealed,

With no one to offer him nourishment;

Alone to suffer.

The potable watersource to be cut off.

The judging gods accepted her suggestions: “The mistress art
thou. . . The fate thou decreest: let it be so!” Assuming that Anu
would go along with the verdict, “the gods then placed the com-
mand to Heaven and Earth.” The Ekur, the Great Pyramid, had
become a prison; and one of the epithets of its mistress was, there-
after, “Mistress of the Prison.”

It was then, we believe, that the sealing of the Great Pyramid
was completed. Leaving Marduk alone in the King’s Chamber, the
arresting gods released behind them the granite plugs of the As-
cending Passage, irrevocably blocking tight all access to the upper
chambers and passages.

Through the channels leading from the “King's Chamber” to
the north and south faces of the pyramid, Marduk had air to
breathe; but he had neither food nor water. He was buried alive,
doomed to die in agony.

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* * *

The record of Marduk’s entombment, alive, within the Great
Pyramid has been preserved on clay tablets found in the ruins of
Ashur and Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capitals. The Ashur text
suggests that it had served as a script for a New Year’s mystery
play in Babylon that reenacted the god’s suffering and reprieve.
But neither the original Babylonian version, nor the Sumerian his-
torical text on which the script was based, have so far been found.

Heinrich Zimmem, who transcribed and translated the Ashur
text from clay tablets in the Berlin Museum, created quite a stir in
theological circles when he announced its interpretation at a lecture
in September 192 1 . The reason was that he interpreted it as a pre-
Christian Mysterium dealing with the death and resurrection of a
god, and thus an earlier Christ tale. When Stephen Langdon in-
cluded an English translation in his 1923 volume on the Mesopota-
mian New Year Mystery Texts, he titled the text The Death and
Resurrection of Bel-Marduk and highlighted its parallels to the
New Testament tale of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But, as the text relates, Marduk or Bel (“The Lord”) did not
die; he was indeed incarcerated inside The Mountain as in a tomb;
but he was entombed alive.

The ancient “script” begins with an introduction of the actors.
The first one “is Bel, who was confined in The Mountain.” Then
there is a messenger who brings the news of the imprisonment to
Marduk’s son Nabu. Shocked by the news, Nabu hastens to The
Mountain in his chariot. He arrives at a structure and the script ex-
plains: “that is the house at the edge of The Mountain wherein they
question him.” In reply to the guards’ questions, they are told that
the agitated god is “Nabu who from Borsippa comes; it is he who
comes to seek after the welfare of his father who is imprisoned.”

Actors then come out and rush about on the stage; “they are the
people who in the streets hasten; they seek Bel, saying: ‘Where is
he held captive?’ ” We learn from the text that “after Bel had gone
into The Mountain, the city fell into tumult” and “because of him
fighting within it broke out.” A goddess appears; she is Sarpanit,
the sister-wife of Marduk. She is confronted by a messenger “who
weeps before her, saying: ‘Unto The Mountain they have taken
him.’ ” He shows her the garments of Marduk (possibly blood-
stained): “these are his raiment, which they took off him,” he
says; instead of these, he reports, Marduk “with a Garment-of-
Sentence was clothed.” What the audience is shown are shrouds:
“That means: in a coffin he is.” Marduk has been buried!

225

The Prisoner in the Pyramid

Sarpanit goes to a structure that symbolizes Marduk’s tomb. She
sees a group of mourners. The script explains:

These are those who make lament
after the gods had locked him up,
separating him from among the living.

Into the House of Captivity,
away from the sun and light,
they put him in prison.

The drama has reached its ominous peak: Marduk is dead. . . .
But wait— all hope is not lost! Sarpanit recites an appeal to the
two gods who can approach Inanna regarding Marduk’s incarcera-
tion, her father Sin and her brother Utu/Shamash: “She prays to
Sin and Shamash, saying: ‘Give life to Bel!’

Priests, a stargazer, and messengers now appear in procession,
reciting prayers and incantations. Offerings are made to Ishtar,
“that she may show her mercy.” The high priest appeals to the su-
preme god, to Sin and to Shamash: “Restore Bel to life!”

Now the drama takes a new turn. Suddenly the actor who repre-
sents Marduk, clothed with shrouds which “with blood are dyed,”
speaks out: “I am not a sinner! I shall not be smitten!” He an-
nounces that the supreme god has reviewed his case and found him
not guilty.

Who, then, was the murderer? The attention of the audience is
diverted to a doorpost; “it is the doorpost of Sarpanit in Babylon.”
The audience learns that the real guilty god has been captured.
They see his head through the doorway: “That is the head of the
evildoer, whom they shall smite and slay.”

Nabu, who had returned to Borsippa, “comes back from
Borsippa; he comes and stands over the evildoer and regards him. ’ ’
We do not learn the identity of The Evildoer, except to be told that
Nabu had seen him before in Marduk’s company. “This is the
sinner,” he says, and thereby seals the captive’s fate.

The priests grab The Evildoer; he is slain: “The one whose sin it
was” is carried away in a coffin. The murderer of Dumuzi has paid
with his life.

But is the sin of Marduk— as the indirect cause of Dumuzi’s
death— atoned? Sarpanit reappears, wearing the Garments-of-
Atonement. Symbolically she wipes away the blood that has been
spilled. With pure water she washes her hands: “It is water for
hand-washing which they bring after The Evildoer has been carried

226

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away.” In “all the sacred places of Bel” torches are lit. Again, ap-
peals are directed to the supreme god. The supremacy of Ninurta,
which had once been proclaimed when Ninurta vanquished Zu, is
reasserted, apparently to allay any fear that a released Marduk
might become a challenger for supremacy among the gods. The ap-
peals succeed, and the supreme god sends the divine messenger
Nusku to “announce the [good] tidings to all the gods.”

As a gesture of good will, Gula (the spouse of Ninurta) sends to
Sarpanit new clothing and sandals for Marduk; Marduk’s driver-
less chariot also appears. But Sarpanit is dumbfounded: she cannot
understand how Marduk can be free again if he had been impris-
oned in a tomb that cannot be unsealed: “How can they let him
free, the one who cannot come out?”

Nusku, the divine messenger, tells her that Marduk shall pass
through SA.BAD, the “chiseled upper opening.” He explains that
it is

Dalat biri sha iqabuni ilani
A doorway-shaft which the gods will bore;

Shunu itasrushu ina bin etarba
Its vortex they will lift off,
his abode they shall reenter.

Dalta ina panishu etedili

The door which was barred before him

Shunu hurrate ina libbi dalti uptalishu

At the vortex of the hollowing, into the insides,

a doorway they shall twistingly bore;

Qarabu ina libbi uppushu

Getting near, into its midst they will break through.

This description of how Marduk shall be released has remained
meaningless to scholars; but the verses are explosively meaningful
to us. As we have explained, the irregular and twisting segment C
of the Well Shaft had not existed when the pyramid was completed
and when Marduk was imprisoned within it; it was, instead, the
veiy “doorway-shaft which the gods will bore” to rescue Marduk.

Still familiar with the pyramid’s inner layout, the Anunnaki real-
ized that the shortest and quickest way to reach the starved Marduk

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The Prisoner in the Pyramid

was to tunnel a connecting shaft between the existing segments B
and D— a tunneling of a mere thirty-two feet through the relatively
soft limestone blocks; it was a task that could be achieved not in
days but in hours.

Removing the stone that covered the Well Shaft’s entrance from
the Descending Passage to G, the rescuers quickly climbed up in-
clined segments F and E. Where E connected with vertical segment
D, a granite stone covered the entrance in the Grotto; it was pushed
aside— and still lies there, in the Grotto— as we have shown in Fig.
70. Now the rescuers climbed the short distance up segment D, and
faced the first course of the pyramid’s masonry.

Thirty-two feet above but to the side lay the bottom of vertical
segment B and the way into the Grand Gallery. But who could have
known how to bore a twisting connecting shaft— C— except those
who had built the pyramid, knew of its inner sealed-off upper sec-
tions, and had the plans to locate them?

It was the rescuers of Marduk, we suggest, who used their tools
to break through the limestone blocks, the link between D and B:
“a hollowing into its insides they shall twistingly bore,” in the
words of the ancient text.

Achieving the linkup with B, they clambered to the short, hori-
zontal passage, A. There, any stranger would have stopped short
even if he had gone that far up, for all he would have seen would be
a stone wall— solid masonry. Again we suggest that only the Anun-
naki, who had the pyramid’s plan, could have known that beyond
the stone facing them there lay the immense cavity of the Grand
Gallery, the Queen’s Chamber, and all the other upper chambers
and passages of the pyramid.

To gain access to those chambers and passages it was necessary
to remove the wedgelike ramp stone (Fig. 72). But it was wedged
too tightly and could not be moved.

If the stone would have been moved away, it would have still
been lying there, in the Grand Gallery. Instead, there is a gaping
hole (Fig. 68), and those who have examined it have invariably
used the words blown up and blown open to describe what it looks
like; and it was done not from the Gallery but from inside the
Shaft: “the hollow has the appearance of having been burst open
by tremendous force from within” the Shaft (Rutherford, Pyramid-
ology).

Again the Mesopotamian record offers a solution. The stone was
indeed removed from within the horizontal passageway, because it
was from there that the rescuers had arrived. And it was indeed

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“burst open by a tremendous force”; in the words of the ancient
text, “Getting near, into its midst they will break through.” The
fragments of the limestone block slid down the Ascending Pas-
sage, down all the way to the granite plugs; that is where A1
Mamoon’s men found them. The explosion also covered the Grand
Gallery with the fine, white dust the Arabs had found covering the
floor of the Grand Gallery— mute evidence of the ancient explosion
and the gaping hole it had left.

Having broken through into the Grand Gallery, the rescuers led
Marduk back the way they came. The entry from the Descending
Passage was sealed up again, to be discovered by A1 Mamoon’s
men. The granite plugs remained in place with the triangular junc-
tion stone hiding the plugs and the Ascending Passage for millen-
nia. And, inside the pyramid, the original upper and lower parts of
the Well Shaft were now for all future days connected by a
twisting, harshly tunneled segment.

And what of the rescued Prisoner of the pyramid?

Mesopotamian texts relate that he went into exile; in Egypt Ra
acquired the epithet Amen, “The Hidden One.”

Circa 2000 b.c., he reappeared to claim again supremacy; for
that, mankind ended up paying a most bitter price.

11

“A QUEEN AM I!”

The tale of Inanna/Ishtar is a tale of a “self-made goddess.” Nei-
ther one of the Olden Gods, the original group of astronauts from
the Twelfth Planet, nor even a firstborn daughter of one of them,
she nevertheless propelled herself to the highest ranks and ended
up a member of the Pantheon of Twelve. To achieve that she com-
bined her cunning and her beauty with ruthlessness— a goddess of
war and a goddess of love, who counted among her lovers both
gods and men. And it was she of whom there had been a true case
of death and resurrection.

Inasmuch as the death of Dumuzi was brought about by Inanna’s
desire to become a queen on Earth, the imprisonment and exile of
Marduk did little to satisfy her ambitions. Now, having challenged
and prevailed over a major god, she felt she could no longer be de-
prived of a domain of her own. But where?

The funeral of Dumuzi, one gathers from such texts as Inanna 's
Descent to the Lower World, was held in the Land of Mines in
southern Africa. It was the domain of Inanna’s sister Ereshkigal
and her spouse Nergal. Enlil and Nannar, even Enki, advised
Inanna not to go there; but she made up her mind: “From the Great
Above she set her mind toward the Great Below”; and when she
arrived at the gate of her sister’s capital city, she said to the
gatekeeper: “Tell my elder sister, Ereshkigal,” that she had come
“to witness the funeral rites.”

One would expect the meeting between the sisters to have been
heartwarming, filled with sympathy for the bereaved Inanna. We
learn instead that Inanna, who came uninvited, was received with
unrestrained suspicion. As she was let through the seven gates of
the city leading to Ereshkigal’s palace, she was made to give up her
emblems and regalia of divine status. When Inanna finally came
into the presence of her sister, she found her sitting on her throne
surrounded by seven Anunnaki with a judicial capacity. They
fastened their eyes upon her, the eyes of death.” They said angry
things to her, “words which torture the spirit.” Instead of being
welcomed, Inanna was sentenced to be hung as a corpse from a

229

230

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

stake. ... It was only through the intervention of Enki that she
was saved and revived.

The texts do not explain the reasons for the harsh treatment
meted out to Inanna, nor quote the “torturing words” her accusers
cast at her. But we learn from the beginning of the text that at the
same time that she went on her trip, Inanna sent her messenger to
“fill heaven with complaints for me, in the assembly [of the gods]
ciy out for me.” Attending a funeral was thus a mere pretext; what
she had in mind was to force the gods to satisfy a complaint that she
wished to dramatize.

From the moment of her arrival at the first gate, Inanna threat-
ened violence if she would not be let in. When the news of her ar-
rival was brought to Ereshkigal, “her face turned pale . . . her lips
turned dark” and she wondered out loud what the real purpose of
the visit was. When the two came face-to-face, “Ereshkigal saw
her and burst out at her presence; Ishtar, unflinching, flew at her.”
Somehow Inanna’s intentions spelled danger for Ereshkigal!

We have already found that many of the biblical marital and suc-
cession laws were akin to such laws that governed the behavior of
the Anunnaki; the rules regarding a half-sister are but one example.
The clue to Inanna’s intentions, we believe, can be found in the
book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of Moses, in which the He-
brew code of personal behavior was spelled out. Chapter 25 (verses
5-10) deals with the instance when a married man dies without
having had a son. If the man had a brother, the widow could not
remarry a stranger: it was the duty of the brother — even a married
one — to marry his widowed sister-in-law and have children by her;
and the firstborn boy was to bear the name of the deceased brother,
“so that his name shall not be blotted out.”

This, we believe, is what had also been Inanna’s reason for her
risky journey. For Ereshkigal was married to Nergal, a brother of
Dumuzi: Inanna had come to put the Rule into play. . . . The cus-
tom, we know, put the onus on the eldest brother, who was, in the
case of the sons of Enki, Marduk. But Marduk was found guilty of
indirectly causing the death of Dumuzi, and was punished and ex-
iled. Had Inanna then the right to demand that the next in line,
Nergal, take her as his second wife so that she could have a male
heir?

The personal and succession problems that Inanna’s intentions
would have caused Ereshkigal can well be imagined. Would
Inanna be satisfied to be a second wife, or would she connive and
scheme to usurp the queenship over the African domain? Obvi-

“A Queen Am I!”

231

ously Ereshkigal was not willing to take chances. And so it was,
we believe, that after harsh words between the sisters, Inanna was
hauled before a hastily convened court of “seven Anunnaki who
judge,” was found in violation of the rules, and was summarily
hung on a stake to die a slow death. She survived only because her
father-in-law, Enki, on hearing the terrible news, rushed two emis-
saries to save her. “Upon the corpse they directed that which pul-
sates and that which radiates”; they administered to her the “water
of life” and the “food of life,” and “Inanna arose.”

Back in Sumer the revived Inanna, heartbroken and lonely, spent
her time on the banks of the Euphrates River, tending a wild-
growing tree and voicing her sorrows:

When at last shall I have a holy throne,

that I may sit on it?

When at last shall I have a holy bed,

that I may lie on it?

Concerning this Inanna spoke . . .

She who let her hair down is ill at heart;

The pure Inanna, Oh how she weeps!

One who had taken pity on— and a liking to— Inanna was her
great-grandfather, Anu. It is known from Sumerian texts that
Inanna, who was bom on Earth, “went up to Heaven” at least
once; it is also known that Anu had visited Earth on several occa-
sions. When and where exactly did Anu embrace Inanna as his
Anunitum (“Beloved of Anu”) is not clear, but it was more than
mere Sumerian gossip when texts hinted that the love between Anu
and his great-granddaughter was more than platonic.

Assured thus of sympathy at the highest level, Inanna raised the
issue of a dominion, a “land,” to rule over. But where?

The treatment meted out to Inanna, whatever its reasons, made it
clear that she could not expect to attain a dominion in Africa. Her
spouse Dumuzi was dead, and with him died her claims to queen-
ship in the lands of Enki’s descendants. If her suffering and pre-
vailing over a major god entitled her to a dominion of her own, it
had to be elsewhere. But Mesopotamia, too, and the lands bor-
dering on Mesopotamia were all spoken for. Where could Inanna
be given dominion? Casting their eyes about, the gods came up
with an answer.

The texts dealing with the death of Dumuzi, as well as with the
imprisonment of Marduk, mention the names of Sumerian cities

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and their populace. This suggests that those events had taken place
after the Sumerian urban civilization had already begun circa 3800
b.c. On the other hand, the Egyptian background of the tales
makes no reference to urban settlements and describes a pastoral
environment, suggesting a time prior to 3100 b.c., when urban civ-
ilization in Egypt began. In the writings of Manetho a chaotic pe-
riod of 350 years is said to have preceded the urban kingship of
Menes. That period between 3450 and 3100 b.c. appears to have
been the time of the troubles and tribulations triggered by Marduk:
the Tower of Babel incident; and the Dumuzi affair, when a god of
Egypt was captured and killed, when the Great God of Egypt was
imprisoned and exiled.

It was then, we believe, that the Anunnaki turned their attention
to the Third Region of the Indus Valley, where civilization began
soon thereafter.

Unlike the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations that lasted
for millennia and continued, to this very day, through offspring
civilizations, the one in the Third Region lasted only a millennium.
Soon thereafter it began to decline, and by 1600 b.c. it was totally
gone— its cities in mins, its people dispersed. Human plunder and
the ravages of nature gradually obliterated the civilization’s re-
mains; in time it was totally forgotten. It was only in the 1920s that
archaeologists, led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, began to unearth two
principal centers and several sites in between, stretching over more
than four hundred miles from the Indian Ocean coast northward,
along the Indus River and its tributaries.

Both sites— Mohenjo-Daro to the south and Harappa in the
north— show that they were cities of substance, some three miles in
circumference. High walls ran around and within the cities; these
walls, as well as the public and private buildings, were all con-
structed of bricks made of clay or mud. Originally there were so
many of these bricks that in spite of constant ransacking by subse-
quent home-builders both in ancient times as well as more recently
for such purposes as ballast for the Lahore-Multan railroad,
enough still remains standing to reveal the site of the cities and the
fact that they were laid out in accordance with preconceived city
building plans. *■

At both sites the city was dominated by an acropolis— a raised
area of citadels and temples. In both instances these structures were
of the same measurements and similarly oriented exactly on a
north-south axis— proving that their builders followed strict rules
when it came to erecting the temples. In both cities the second larg-

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233

est feature was immense granaries— grain silos of a vast size and
impressive functionality, situated near the riverbank. This suggests
that grains were not only the chief crop, but also the chief export
product of the Indus civilization.

The cities and the few artifacts that were still found in their
remains— furnaces, ums, pottery, bronze tools, copper beads,
some silver vessels, and ornaments— all attest to a high civilization
that was suddenly transplanted from elsewhere. Thus the two earli-
est brick buildings at Mohenjo-Daro (a huge granary and a fort
tower) were reinforced with timbers— a construction method to-
tally unsuitable to the Indus climate. This method, however, was
soon abandoned, and all subsequent construction avoided timber-
reinforcing. Scholars have concluded from this that the initial
builders were foreigners accustomed to their own climatic needs.

Seeking the fountainhead of the Indus civilization, scholars con-
cluded that it could not have arisen independently of the Sumerian
civilization, which preceded it by almost a thousand years. In spite
of notable differentiations (such as the yet undeciphered picto-
graphic script), the analogies to Mesopotamia are everywhere. The
use of dried mud or clay bricks for construction; the layout of city
streets; the drainage system; the chemical methods used for etch-
ing, for glazing, and for bead-making; the shapes and design of
metal daggers and jars— all bear striking similarity to what had
been uncovered at Ur or Kish or other Mesopotamian sites. Even
the designs and symbols on pottery, seals, or other clay objects are
virtual duplicates of those of Mesopotamia. Significantly the Mes-
opotamian sign of the cross— the symbol of Nibiru, the Home
Planet of the Anunnaki— was also prevalent throughout the Indus
civilization.

Which gods did the people of the Indus Valley worship? The few
pictorial depictions that have been found show them wearing the
divine Mesopotamian homed headdress. More abundant clay figu-
rines indicate that the dominant deity was a goddess, usually naked
and bare-chested (Fig. 74a) or with rows of beads and necklaces as
her sole covering (Fig. 74b); these were well-known depictions of
Inanna, found in abundance in Mesopotamia and throughout the
Near East. It is our suggestion that in their search for a land for
Inanna, the Anunnaki decided to make the Third Region her do-
minion.

Although it is generally held that the evidence for the Mesopota-
mian origins of the Indus civilization and for ongoing contacts
between Sumer and the Indus Valley is limited to the few archaeolog-

“A Queen Am I!”

235

ical remains, we believe that there also exists textual evidence at-
testing to these links. Of particular interest is a long text named by
scholars Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, whose background is
the rise to power of Uruk (the biblical Erech) and of Inanna.

The text describes Aratta as the capital of a land situated be-
yond mountain ranges and beyond Anshan; i . e . , beyond south-
eastern Iran. This is precisely where the Indus Valley lay; and
such scholars as J. van Dijk ( Orientalia 39, 1970) have sur-
mised that Aratta was a city “situated on the Iranian plateau or
on the Indus river.” What is most striking is the fact that the
text speaks of the grain silos of Aratta. It was a place where
“wheat was growing of itself, beans also growing of them-
selves”— crops growing and stored in the storehouses of
Aratta. Then, to be exported, they “poured grain into sacks,
loaded them on the crate-carrying donkeys, and placed them on
the sides of the transporting donkeys.”

Aratta’s geographical location and the fact that it is a place re-
nowned for its grain and bean storehouses bear forceful similarities
to the Indus civilization. Indeed one must wonder whether Harappa
or Arappa is not a present-day echo of the ancient Aratta.

The ancient tale takes us back to the beginning of kingship at
Erech, when a demigod (the son of Utu/Shamash by a human fe-
male) was both high priest and king at the sacred precinct from
which the city was to develop. Circa 2900 b.c. he was succeeded
by his son Enmerkar, “who built Uruk” (according to the Sume-
rian King Lists), transforming it from the nominal abode of an ab-
sentee god (Anu) to a major urban center of a reigning deity. He
achieved this by persuading Inanna to choose Erech as her princi-
pal seat of power and by aggrandizing for her the Eanna (“House
of Anu”) temple.

We read in the ancient text that at first all Enmerkar demanded
of Aratta was that it contribute “precious stones, bronze, lead,
slabs of lapis lazuli” to the building of the enlarged temple, as well
as “artfully fashion gold and silver” so that the Holy Mount being
raised for Inanna would be worthy of the goddess.

But no sooner was this done than the heart of Enmerkar grew
haughty. A drought had afflicted Aratta, and Enmerkar now de-
manded not only materials but also obedience: “Let Aratta submit
to Erech!” he demanded. To achieve his purpose Enmerkar sent to
Aratta a series of emissaries to conduct what S. N. Kramer (History

236

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Begins at Sumer) has characterized as “the first war of nerves.”
Lauding his king and his powers, the emissary quoted verbatim
Enmerkar’s threats to bring desolation upon Aratta and dispersion
upon its people. The ruler of Aratta, however, countered this war
of nerves with a ploy of his own. Reminding the emissary of the
confusion of languages in the aftermath of the Tower of Babel inci-
dent, he claimed he could not understand the message given him in
Sumerian.

In frustration Enmerkar sent another message written on clay
tablets— this time, it appears, in the language of Aratta— a feat
made possible with the help of Nidaba, the Goddess of Writing. In
addition to threats an offering of the seeds of “the olden grain”
that had been kept in Anu’s temple was made— a seed, it appears,
needed badly in Aratta because a long drought had destroyed its
crops. The drought was deemed to have been a sign that it was
Inanna herself who wished Aratta to come “under the protecting
shade of Erech.”

“The lord of Aratta from the herald took the baked tablet; the
lord of Aratta examined the clay.” The writing was in cuneiform
script: “The dictated word was nail-like in appearance.” Was he
to yield or resist? Just at that moment “a storm, like a great lion
attacking, stepped up”; the drought was suddenly broken by a
thunderstorm that made the whole land tremble, the mountains
quake; and once again, “white-walled Aratta” became a land of
abundant grains.

There was no need to yield to Erech; and the lord of Aratta
said to the herald: “Inanna, the queen of the lands, has not
abandoned her House in Aratta; she has not handed over Aratta
to Erech.”

In spite of the rejoicing in Aratta, its expectation that Inanna
would not abandon her abode there was not entirely fulfilled.
Enticed by the prospect of residing in a grand temple at Sumer's
City of Anu, she became a commuting goddess: a “working de-
ity,” so to speak, in faraway Aratta, but a resident in metropol-
itan Erech.

She did her commuting by flying from place to place in her “Boat
of Heaven.” Her flying about gave rise to many depictions of her as
an aeronaut (Fig. 75), and the inference from some texts is that she did
her own piloting. On the other hand, like other major deities, she was

“A Queen Am I!”

237

assigned a pilot-navigator for the more demanding flights. As the
Vedas, which spoke of pilots of the gods (one, Pushan, “guided Indra
through the speckled clouds” in the “golden ship that travels in the
air’s mid-region”), so did the earlier Sumerian texts refer to the
AB.GALs, who ferried the gods across the heavens. Inanna’s pilot-
navigator, we are told, was Nungal; and he was specifically named in
regard to her transfer to the House of Anu in Erech:

Fig. 75

At the time when Enmerkar in Uruk ruled,

Nungal, the lion-hearted, was the Pilot
who from the skies brought Ishtar down
to the E-Anna.

According to the Sumerian King Lists, kingship after the Deluge
began at Kish. Then, ‘ ‘the Kingship to the Eanna was carried. ’ ’ As
archaeologists have confirmed, Erech indeed had its beginnings as
a temple city, consisting of the sacred precinct where Anu’s first
modest shrine (“White Temple”) was built atop a raised platform
(Fig. 70; the site remained in the city’s heart even as Erech grew
and its temples were aggrandized, as the remains of the city and its
walls indicate (Fig. 77).

Archaeologists have come upon the remains of a magnificent
temple dedicated to Inanna and dating to the early part of the third
millennium b.c.— possibly the very temple constructed by Enmer-

“A Queen Am I!”

239

kar. It was uniquely built with decorated high columns (Fig. 78)
and must have been as lavish and impressive as the hymns that sang
its praises had described:

Fig. 78

With lapis-lazuli was adorned.

Decorated with the handiwork of Ninagal.

In the bright place . . .
the residence of Inanna,
the lyre of Anu they installed.

With all that, Erech was still a “provincial” town, lacking the
stature of other Sumerian cities, which had the distinction of hav-
ing been rebuilt on the sites of pre-Diluvial cities. It lacked the sta-
tus and benefits that stemmed from the possession of the “Divine
MEs.” Though they are constantly referred to, the nature of the
ME is not clear, and scholars translate the term as “divine com-
mandments,” “divine powers,” or even “mythic virtues.” The
ME, however, are described as physical objects that one could pick
up and carry, or even put on, and which contained secret knowl-
edge or data. Perhaps they were something like our present-day
computer chips, on which data, programs, and operational orders
have been minutely recorded. On them the essentials of civilization
were encoded.

These MEs were in the possession of Enki, the chief scientist of
the Anunnaki. They were released by him to benefit mankind grad-
ually, step by step; and the turn of Erech to attain the heights of
civilization had, apparently, not yet come when Inanna became its
resident deity. Impatient, Inanna decided to use her feminine
charms to improve the situation.

240

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

A text titled by S. N. Kramer (Sumerian Mythology ) as
“Inanna and Enki,” but whose original (and more poetic) Su-
merian title is unknown, describes how Inanna journeyed in her
“Boat of Heaven” to the Abzu, where Enki had secreted away
the MEs. Realizing that Inanna was coming to call on him by
herself— “the maiden, all alone, has directed her step to the
Abzu” — Enki ordered his chamberlain to prepare a sumptuous
meal, including plenty of date wine. After Inanna and Enki had
feasted and Enki’s heart became happy with drink, Inanna
brought up the subject of the MEs. Gracious with drink, Enki
presented to her ME for “Lordship . . . , Godship, the Exalted
and Enduring Tiara, the Throne of Kingship,” and “bright
Inanna took them.” As Inanna worked her charms on her aging
host, Enki made to her a second presentation of “the Exalted
Scepter and Staff, the Exalted Shrine, Righteous Ru-
lership”; and “bright Inanna took them,” too.

As the feasting and drinking went on, Enki parted with seven
major MEs, embracing the functions and attributes of a Divine
Lady, her temple and rituals, its priests, eunuchs, and prostitutes;
warfare and weapons; justice and courts; music and arts; masonry;
woodworking and metal working; leatherwork and weaving;
scribeship and mathematics; and so on.

With the encoded data for all these attributes of a high civiliza-
tion in her hands, Inanna slipped away and took off in her Boat of
Heaven, back to Erech. Hours later a sobered Enki realized that
Inanna and the MEs were gone. His somewhat embarrassed cham-
berlain reminded Enki that he, Enki himself, had made the MEs a
present to Inanna. Greatly upset, Enki ordered his chamberlain to
pursue Inanna in Enki’s “Great Heavenly Skychamber” and re-
trieve the MEs. Overtaking Inanna at the first stopping point, the
chamberlain explained to Inanna his orders; but Inanna, asking,
“Why had Enki changed his word to me?” refused. Reporting
the situation to Enki, the chamberlain was ordered to seize
Inanna’s Boat of Heaven, bring the Boat to Eridu, and release
Inanna, but without the MEs. But in Eridu, Inanna ordered her
trusted pilot to “save the Boat of Heaven and the MEs pre-
sented to Inanna.” And so, while Inanna kept the argument
with Enki’s chamberlain going, her pilot slipped away in her
boat with the invaluable MEs.

An Exaltation of Inanna, composed to be read responsively
by the congregation, echoes the sentiments of the people of
Erech:

“A Queen Am I!”

241

Lady of the MEs, Queen

Brightly resplendent;

Righteous, clothed in radiance

Beloved of Heaven and Earth;

Hierodule of Anu,

Wearing the great adorations;

For the exalted tiara appropriate,

For the high-priesthood suitable.

The seven MEs she attained.

In her hand she is holding.

Lady of the great MEs,

Of them she is the guardian . . .

It was in those days that Inanna was incorporated into the Pan-
theon of Twelve, and (replacing Ninharsag) was assigned the
planet Venus (MUL DILBAT) as her celestial counterpart and the
constellation AB.SIN (Virgo) as her zodiac house; the latter’s de-
piction has hardly changed from Sumerian times (Fig. 79). Ex-
pressing her own gratification, Inanna announced for all — gods and
men alike— to hear: “A Queen am I!”

Fig. 79

Hymns acknowledged her new status among the gods and her
celestial attributes:

To the one who comes forth from heaven,

To the one who comes forth from heaven,

“Hail!” we do say . . .

Loftiness, greatness, reliability [are hers]
as she comes forth radiantly in the evening.

242

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

a holy torch that fills the heavens;

Her stance in heaven is like the Moon and Sun . . .

In Heaven she is secure, the good “wild cow” of Anu;

On Earth she is enduring, mistress of the lands.

In the Abzu, from Eridu, she received the MEs;

Her godfather Enki presented them to her,

Lordship and Kingship he placed in her hand.

With Anu she takes her seat upon the great throne,

With Enlil she determines the fates in her land . . .

Turning from her high position among the gods to her worship
by the Sumerians (the “Black-Headed People”), the hymns went
on:

In all the land, the black-headed people assemble
when abundance has been placed in the storehouses of Su-
mer . . .

They come to her with . . . , they bring disputes before her.
She renders judgment to the evil and destroys the wicked;

She favors the just, determines good fate for them . . .

The good lady, the joy of Anu, a heroine she is;

She surely comes forth from Heaven . . .

She is mighty, she is trustworthy, she is great;

She is exceeding in youthfulness.

The people of Erech had every reason to be thankful to Inanna,
for under her deityship, Erech had become an affluent center of Su-
merian civilization. In praising her wisdom and valor, the people
of Erech failed not also to mention her beauty and attractiveness.
Indeed, it was at about that time that Inanna instituted the custom
of the “Sacred Marriage,” sexual rites whereby the priest-king
was supposed to have become her spouse— but only for a night. A
text, attributed to a king named Iddin-Dagan, described this aspect
of Inanna's temple life— with music, male prostitute entertainers,
and all:

The male-prostitutes comb her hair . . .

They decorate the neck with colored bands . . .

Their right side they adorn with women's clothing
as they walk before the pure Inanna . . .

Their left side they cover with men’s clothing
as they walk before the pure Inanna . . .

243

“A Queen Am I!”

With jump ropes and colored cords they compete before
her . . .

The young men, carrying hoops, sing before her . . .

The maidens, Shugia priestesses, walk before Inanna . . .
They set up a bed for my lady,

They cleanse rushes with sweet smelling cedar oil;

For Inanna, for the King, they arrange the bed . . .

The king approaches her pure lap proudly;

Proudly he approaches the lap of Inanna . . .

He caresses her pure lap,

She stretches out on the bed, the pure lap;

She makes love with him on her bed.

She says to Iddin-Dagan: “Surely, you are my beloved.”

This habit of Inanna may have begun with Enmerkar himself, a
sexual union of which the next ruler of Uruk, a demigod known as
“divine Lugalbanda, a Righteous Supervisor,” was the progeny.
Of Lugalbanda, too, as of Enmerkar, several epic tales have been
found. Inanna, it seems, wanted him to reside in her stead in
Aratta; but Lugalbanda was too restless and adventurous to stay
put. One epic tale (Lugalbanda and Mount Hurum) describes his
dangerous journey to the “awesome place on Earth” in search of
the Divine Black Bird. He reached the Restricted Mount “where
the Anunnaki, gods of the mountain, inside the earth like termites
had tunneled.” Seeking a ride in the Bird of Heaven, Lugalbanda
pleaded with its custodian; his words immortalized man’s desire to
fly:

Like Utu let me go, like Inanna,

Like the Seven Stormers of Ishkur
in a flame let me lift myself off,
and thunder away!

Let me go wherever my eyes can see,

Wherever I desire, let me set my foot,

Wherever my heart wishes, let me arrive . . .

When he had arrived at Mount Hurum (“whose front Enlil as
with a great door had closed off”), Lugalbanda was challenged by
the Guardian: “If a god you are, a word in friendship will I utter
which will let you enter; If a man you are, your fate will I decree.”
To which:

244

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Lugalbanda, he of beloved seed,
stretched his hand out [and said]:

“Like divine Shara am I,
the beloved son of Inanna.”

But the Guardian of the sacred place turned Lugalbanda down
with an oracle: indeed, he would reach far lands and make both
himself and Erech famous, but he would do so on foot.

Another long epic tale, originally called by scholars “Lugalban-
da and Enmerkar’ ’ and more recently The Lugalbanda Epic, affirms
Lugalbanda’s semi-divine descent but does not identify his father; we
can assume, however, from the circumstances and subsequent events,
that the father was Enmerkar; confirming Enmerkar as the first one in
a long list of rulers who, under the guise of a symbolic marriage or
without it, were invited by Inanna to share her bed.

This “invitation” by Inanna is featured in the well-known Epic
of Gilgamesh. The fifth ruler of Erech, Gilgamesh sought to escape
the mortals’ destiny to die because, as a son of the goddess Ninsun
and the high priest of the Kullab, “two thirds of him were god.” In
his search for immortality (examined at length in The Stairway to
Heaven), he first journeyed to the “Landing Place” in the Cedar
Mountain— the olden landing platform in the mountains of Leba-
non (to which, apparently, Lugalbanda had also gone). Battling the
mechanical monster that guarded the restricted area’s perimeter,
Gilgamesh and his companion were almost annihilated were it not
for Utu’s help. Exhausted from the battle, Gilgamesh took off his
drenched clothes so that he might wash and rest. It was then that
Inanna/Ishtar, who watched the struggle from the skies, was seized
with a craving for Gilgamesh:

He washed his grimy hair, polished his weapons;

The braid of his hair he shook out against his back.

He cast off his soiled things, put on his clean ones,

Wrapped a fringed cloak about, fastened with a sash.

When Gilgamesh put on his tiara.

Glorious Ishtar raised an eye at the beauty of Gilgamesh.
“Come, Gilgamesh, be thou my lover!” [she said]

“Do grant me of thy fruitfulness;

thou shalt be a husband, I Snell ! be a wife.”

She reinforced her invitation with promises of a glorious (though
not everlasting) life if Gilgamesh would accede to her otter. But Gil-

*‘A Queen Am I!”

245

gamesh retorted with a long list of her lovers whom she befriended
though she had “ordained for Tammuz [Dumuzi], the lover of
your youth, wailing year after year”; while still supposedly in
mourning, he said, she acquired and discarded lovers “as a shoe
which pinches the foot of its owner . . . as a door which does no*
keep out the wind . . . Which lover didst thou love forever?”
he asked; “if thou shouldst make love to me, thou wouldst treat me
like them.” (The offended Inanna thereupon received Anu’s per-
mission to launch against Gilgamesh the Bull of Heaven; Gilga-
mesh was saved from it at the last moment at the gates of Erech).

The golden era of Erech was not to last forever. Seven other
kings followed Gilgamesh on its throne. Then, “Uruk was smitten
with weapons; its kingship to Ur was carried.” Thorkild Jacobsen,
whose study The Sumerian King List is the most thorough on the
subject, believes that the transfer of kingship in Sumer from Erech
to Ur occurred circa 2850 b.c.; others adopt a lower date of circa
2650 b.c. (Such a discrepancy of two centuries has persisted into
later times and remains unexplained by scholars.)

The reigns of the various rulers were getting shorter and shorter
as the site of kingship swung back and forth among Sumer's princi-
pal cities: from Ur to Awan, then back to Kish; to a city named
Hamazi, then back to Erech and Ur; to Adab and Mari, and back to
Kish; to Aksak and again to Kish; and finally once more to Erech.
In the course of no more than 220 years, there were thus three addi-
tional dynasties at Kish, three at Erech, two at Ur, and single ones
in five other cities. It was, by all appearances, a volatile period; it
was also a time of increasing friction between the cities, mostly
over water rights and irrigation canals— phenomena that can be ex-
plained by drier weather on the one hand and rising populations on
the other. In each instance the town that lost out was said to have
been “smitten with weapons.” Mankind had begun to wage its
own wars!

The resort to arms to settle local disputes was becoming more
commonplace. Inscriptions from those days indicate that the ha-
rassed populace was competing, through offerings and enhanced
worship, for the favors of the gods; the warring city-states increas-
ingly involved their patron-gods in their petty disputes. In one re-
corded instance Ninurta was involved in determining whether an
irrigation ditch encroached on another city’s boundaries. Enlil,
too, was forced to order the warring parties to disengage. This con-
stant strife and lack of stability soon reached a point when the gods

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

246

had had enough. Once before, when the Deluge was coming, Enlil
was so disgusted with mankind that he schemed its obliteration by
the great flood. Then, in the Tower of Babel incident, he ordered
mankind’s dispersion and the confusion of its languages. Now,
again, he was growing disgusted.

The historical background to the events that followed was the
final attempt by the gods to reestablish Kish, the original capital, as
the center of kingship. For the fourth time they returned kingship to
Kish, starting the dynasty with rulers whose names indicate fealty
to Sin, Ishtar, and Shamash. Two rulers, however, bore names in-
dicating that they were followers of Ninurta and his spouse-
evidence of a revived rivalry between the House of Sin and the
House of Ninurta. It resulted in the seating on the throne of a
nonentity— “Nannia, a stone cutter”; he reigned a brief seven years.

In such unsettled circumstances Inanna was able to retrieve the
kingship for Erech. The man chosen for the task, one Lugal-zagesi,
retained the favor of the gods for twenty-five years; but then, attacking
Kish to assure her permanent desolation, he only managed to raise En-
id’s ire; and the idea of a strong hand at the helm of human kingship
made more and more sense. There was a need for someone unin-
volved in all these disputes, someone who would provide firm leader-
ship and once again properly perform the role of the king as sole
intermediary between the gods and the people in all matters mundane.

It was Inanna who, on one of her flying trips, found that man.

Her encounter with him, circa 2400 b.c., launched a new era.
He was a man who began his career as a cup-bearer to the king of
Kish. When he took over the state reins in central Mesopotamia, he
quickly extended his rule to all of Sumer, to its neighboring coun-
tries, and even unto distant lands. The epithet-name of this first
empire-builder was Sharru-Kin (“Righteous Ruler”); modem
textbooks call him Sargon I or Sargon the Great (Fig. 80). He built
himself a brand-new capital not far from Babylon and named it
Agade (“United”); we know it as Akkad— a name from which
stems the term Akkadian for the first Semitic language.

A text known as The Legend of Sargon records, in Sargon’s own
words, his odd personal history:

Sargon, the mighty king of Agade, am I.

My mother was a high priestess; I knew not my father . . .

My mother, the high priestess, who conceived me,

in secret she bore me.

She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen sealed the lid.

“A Queen Am I!”

247

Fig. 80

She cast me into the river; it did not sink me.

The river bore me up, it carried me to Akki the irrigator.

Akki the irrigator lifted me up when he drew water;

Akki, the irrigator, as his son made me and reared me.

Akki, the irrigator, appointed me as his gardener.

This Moses-like tale (written more than a thousand years before
the time of Moses!) then continues to answer the obvious question:
How could a man of unknown fatherhood, a mere gardener, be-
come a mighty king? Sargon answered the questions thus:

While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love,

And for four and fifty years I exercised Kingship;

The Black-headed people I ruled and governed.

The laconic statement is elaborated in another text. The encoun-
ter between Sargon the workingman and Ishtar the lovely goddess
was accidental but far from innocent:

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

One day my queen,

After crossing heaven, crossing earth—

Inanna.

After crossing heaven, crossing earth—

After crossing Elam and Shubur,

After crossing . . .

The hierodule approached weary, fell asleep.

I saw her from the edge of my garden;

Kissed her, copulated with her.

Inanna— by then awakened, we must assume— found in Sargon a
man to her liking, a man who could satisfy not only her bedtime
cravings but also her political ambitions. A text known as the Sar-
gon Chronicle states that “Sharru-Kin, king of Agade, rose [to
power] in the era of Ishtar. He had neither rival nor opponent. He
spread his terror-inspiring glamor over all the countries. He
crossed the sea in the east; he conquered the country of the west, in
its full extent.”

The enigmatic reference to the “Era of Ishtar” has baffled the
scholars; but it can only mean what it says: at that time, for what-
ever reasons, Inanna/Ishtar was able to have a man of her choice
take the throne and create for her an empire: “He defeated Uruk
and tore down its wall. ... He was victorious in the battle with
the inhabitants of Ur . . .he defeated the entire territory from La-
gash as far as the sea. . . .” There were also the conquests be-
yond the olden boundaries of Sumer: “Mari and Elam are standing
in obedience before Sargon.”

The grandeur of Sargon and the greatness of Inanna, going hand
in hand, were expressed in the construction of the new capital city
of Agade and in it the UL.MASH (“Glittering, Luxurious”) tem-
ple to Inanna. “In those days,” a Sumerian historiographic text
relates, “the dwellings of Agade were filled with gold; its bright-
shining houses were filled with silver. Into its storehouses were
brought copper, lead and slabs of lapis-lazuli; its granaries bulged
at the sides. Its old men were endowed with wisdom, its old
women were endowed with eloquence; its young men were en-
dowed with the Strength-of-Weapons, its little children were en-
dowed with joyous hearts. . . . The city was full of music.”

In that beautiful and happy city, “in Agade did holy Inanna erect
a temple as her noble abode; in the Ulmash she set up a throne. ’ ’ It
was the crowning temple in a series of shrines to her that encom-
passed Sumer’s principal cities. Stating that “in Erech, the E-Anna

“A Queen Am I!”

249

is mine,” Inanna listed her shrines in Nippur, Ur, Girsu, Adab,
Kish, Der, Akshak, and Umma, and lastly the Ulmash in Agade.
“Is there a god who can vie with me?” she asked.

Yet, though promoted by Inanna, the elevation of Sargon to
kingship over what was henceforth known as Sumer and Akkad
could not have taken place without the consent and blessing of Anu
and Enlil. A bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian) text, originally in-
scribed on a statue of Sargon that was placed before Enlil in his
temple in Nippur, stated that Sargon was not only “Commanding
Overseer” of Ishtar, but also “anointed priest of Anu” and “great
regent of Enlil.” It was Enlil, Sargon wrote, who “had given him
lordship and kingship.”

Sargon’s records of his conquests describe Inanna as actively
present on the battlefields but attribute to Enlil the overall decision
regarding the scope of the victories and the extent of the territories:
“Enlil did not let anybody oppose Sargon, the king of the land;
from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea Enlil gave unto him.” Invari-
ably, postscripts to Sargon’s inscriptions invoked Anu, Enlil,
Inanna, and Utu/Shamash as his “witnesses.”

As one scrutinizes this vast empire, stretching from the Upper
Sea (Mediterranean) to the Lower Sea (Persian Gulf), it becomes
clear that Sargon’s conquests were, at first, limited to the domains
of Sin and his children (Inanna and Utu) and, even at their peak,
kept well within the Enlilite territories. Sargon reached Lagash, the
city of Ninurta, and conquered the territory from Lagash south-
ward, but not Lagash itself; nor did he expand to the northeast of
Sumer where Ninurta held sway. Going beyond the boundaries of
olden Sumer, he entered to the southeast the land of Elam— an area
under Inanna’s influence from earlier times. But when Sargon was
entering the lands to the west on the mid-Euphrates and the Medi-
terranean coast, the domains of Adad, “Sargon prostrated himself
in prayer before the god . . . [and] he gave him in the upper region
Mari, Yarmuli and Ebla, as far as the cedar forest and the silver
mountain.”

It is clear from Sargon’s inscriptions that he was neither given
Tilmun (the gods’ own Fourth Region), nor Magan (Egypt), nor
Meluhha (Ethiopia) in the Second Region, the domains of Enki’s
descendants; with those lands he only conducted peaceful trading
relations. In Sumer itself he kept out of the area controlled by
Ninurta and from the city claimed by Marduk. But then, “in his old
age,” Sargon made a mistake:

250 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

He took away soil from the foundation of Babylon
and built upon the soil another Babylon beside Agade.

To understand the severity of this deed, we ought to recall the
meaning of “Babylon”— Bab-Ili, “Gateway of the Gods.” A title
and a function claimed for Babylon by a defiant Marduk, it was
symbolized by its hallowed soil. Now, encouraged by Inanna and
driven by her ambitions, Sargon took away the sacred soil to spread
it as a foundation for the new Bab-Ili, audaciously aiming to trans-
fer the title and function to Agade.

This was, as it turned out, an opportunity for Marduk — unheard
from for so many centuries — to reassert himself:

On account of the sacrilege Sargon thus committed,
the great lord Marduk became enraged
and destroyed his people by hunger.

From the east to the west he alienated them from Sargon;
and upon him he inflicted as punishment that he could not rest.

Desperately crushing one revolt after another, Sargon “could
not rest”; discredited and afflicted, he died after a reign of fifty-
four years.

12

PRELUDE TO DISASTER

The information concerning the last years of the Era of Ishtar
comes to us from a number of texts. Put together, they unfold a tale
of dramatic and incredible events: the usurpation of supreme pow-
ers on Earth by a goddess; the defilement of Enlil’s Holy of Holies
in Nippur; the penetration of the Fourth Region by a human army;
an invasion of Egypt; the appearance of African gods in the Asian
domains; acts and occurrences that were unthinkable before; up-
heavals among the gods, which served as a stage on which human
rulers played out their roles and human blood was spilled without
mercy.

Faced with the reemergence of her olden adversary, Inanna
could simply not give up, no matter what the cost. Seating on Sar-
gon’s throne first one of his sons and then another, enlisting in her
campaigns her vassal kings in the eastern mountainlands, she
fought as an enraged lioness for her disintegrating empire, “rain-
ing flame over the land . . . attacking like an aggressive storm.”

“You are known by your destruction of the rebel lands,” in-
toned a daughter of Sargon in a plaintive poem; “you are known by
massacring their people” . . . turning “against the city that said
not ‘the land is yours,’ ” making “its rivers run with blood.”

For more than two years Inanna wrought havoc all around, until
the gods decided that the only way to stop the carnage was to force
Marduk back into exile. Having returned to Babylon when Sargon
tried to remove some of its hallowed soil — an act whose symbolism
was rooted in legendary events — Marduk fortified the city and in
particular ingeniously enhanced its underground water system,
making the city impervious to attack. Unable or unwilling to re-
move Marduk by force, the Anunnaki turned to Marduk’s brother
Nergal and asked him to “scare Marduk off the divine seat” in
Babylon.

We know of these events from a text named by scholars The
Erra Epos, for in it Nergal is called by the ancient chronicler
ER.RA— a somewhat derogatory epithet, for it meant “The Ser-
vant of Ra.” It is a text that could better be called The Tale of the

251

252

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Sins ofNergal, for it puts the blame on Nergal for a chain of events
with a catastrophic ending; but it is an invaluable source for our
knowledge and understanding of that prelude to disaster.

Having accepted the mission, Nergal/Erra journeyed to Meso-
potamia for a face-to-face talk with Marduk. Arriving in Mesopo-
tamia, he first stopped at Erech, “the city of Anu, the king of all
the gods,” but, of course, also the place to huddle with Inan-
na/Ishtar. Arriving in Babylon, “into the Esagil, temple of Heaven
and Earth, he entered, and stood before Marduk.” The momentous
encounter has been recorded by the ancient artists (Fig. 81); it de-
picts both gods holding on to their weapons, but the helmeted Mar-
duk, standing on a platform, does extend some symbol of welcome
to his brother.

Fig. 81

Combining praise with reprimand, Erra told Marduk that the
wonderful things he had done for Babylon, and especially its
waterworks, made Marduk’s reputation “shine as a star in the
heavens,” but have deprived other cities of their waters. More-
over, while crowning himself in Babylon, “lights up its sacred
precinct,” it angered the other gods; “the abode of Anu with
darkness it covers.” Marduk, he concluded, could not go on
against the will of the other Anunnaki and certainly not against
the will of Anu.

But Marduk, citing changes that were made on Earth in the after-
math of the Deluge, explained that he had to take matters into his
own hands:

Prelude to Disaster

253

In the aftermath of the Deluge,

the decrees of Heaven and Earth had gone astray.

The cities of the gods upon the wide Earth
were changed around;

They were not brought back to their locations . . .

As I survey them again, of the evil I am disgusted;

Without a return to their [original] places.

Mankind’s existence is diminished . . .

Rebuild I must my residence
which in the Deluge was wiped away;

Its name [I must] call again.

Among the post-Diluvian disorders that bothered Marduk were
some failures on the part of Erra himself to account for certain di-
vine artifacts— “the instrument of giving orders, the Oracle of the
Gods; the sign of kingship, the Holy Scepter which contributes
brilliance to Lordship. . . . Where is the holy Radiating Stone
which disintegrates all?” Marduk asked. If he were forced to
leave, Marduk said, “on the day I step off my seat, the flooding
shall from its well cease to work . . . the waters shall not rise . . .
the bright day to darkness [shall turn] . . . confusion shall arise
. . . the winds of draught shall howl . . . sicknesses shall
spread.”

After some more exchanges Erra offered to return to Marduk
“the artifacts of Heaven and Earth” if Marduk would personally
go to the Lower World to pick them up; and as to the “works” in
Babylon, he assured Marduk there was nothing to worry about: he
(Erra) would enter Marduk’ s House only to “erect the Bulls of Anu
and Enlil at thy gate”— statues of Winged Bulls as were actually
found at temple sites— but would do nothing to upset the water-
works.

Marduk heard this;

The promise, given by Erra, found his favor.

So did he step down from his seat,

and to the Land of Mines, abode of the Anunnaki,

he set his direction.

Thus persuaded, Marduk agreed to leave Babylon. But no
sooner he had done that than Nergal broke his word. Unable to re-
sist his curiosity, Nergal/Erra ventured into the Gigunu, the myste-
rious underground chamber which Marduk had stressed was off

r

254 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

limits; and there Erra caused its “Brilliance” (radiating source of
energy) to be removed. Thereupon, as Marduk had warned, “the
day turned into darkness,” the “flooding was disarrayed,” and
soon “the lands were laid to waste, the people were made to per-
ish.”

All of Mesopotamia was affected, for Ea/Enki, Sin and Sha-
mash, in their cities, became alarmed; “with anger [at Erra ] they
were filled.” The people made sacrifices to Anu and Ishtar but to
no avail: “the water sources went dry.” Ea, Erra’s father, re-
proached him: “Now that Prince Marduk had stepped off, what
have you done?” He ordered that a statue of Erra, which had been
prepared, should not be set up in the Esagil. “Go away!” he or-
dered Erra. “Take off to where no gods ever go!”

“Erra lost his voice” only for a moment, then uttered words of
impudence. Enraged, he smashed Marduk’s abode, set fire to its
gates. Defiantly, “he made a sign” as he turned to leave, announc-
ing that his followers, however, would stay behind: “as to my war-
riors, they shall not go back.” And so it was that when Erra
returned to Kutha, the men who had come with him stayed behind,
establishing a long-lasting presence for Nergal in the lands of Shem; a
colony was assigned to them not far from Babylon, perhaps as a per-
manent garrison; there were “Kutheans who worship Nergal” in
Samaria in biblical times; and there was official worship of Nergal in
Elam, as evidenced by an unusual bronze sculpture (Fig. 82) found
there, depicting worshipers with unmistakable African features per-
forming a cultic ceremony in a temple courtyard.

The departure of Marduk from Babylon brought to an end Ish-
tar’s conflict with him; the rift between Marduk and Nergal and the
latter’s retention of an Asian presence unintentionally created an
alliance between Ishtar and Nergal. The chain of tragic events that
no one could have predicted and that no one had perhaps even de-
sired was thus being forged by fate, leading the Anunnaki and
Mankind ever closer to the ultimate disaster. . . .

With her authority restored, Inanna renewed the kingship in
Agade and put on the throne a grandson of Sargon, Naram-Sin
(“Sin’s Favorite”). Seeing in him, at last, a true successor to Sar-
gon, she encouraged him to seek grandeur and greatness. After a
brief period of peace and prosperity she goaded Naram-Sin to em-
bark on an expansion of the erstwhile empire. Soon Inanna began
to encroach on the territories of other gods; but they were unable or
unwilling to fight her: “The great Anunnaki gods fled before you
like fluttering bats,” a hymn to Inanna stated; “they could not

Prelude to Disaster

255

Fig. 82

stand before your fearsome face . . . could not soothe your angry
heart.” Rock carvings in the annexed territories depicted Inanna as
the ruthless conqueror she had become (Fig. 83).

At the beginning of her campaigns Inanna was still called ‘‘Be-
loved of Enlil” and one ‘‘Who carries out the instructions of
Anu.” But then her thrust began to change in nature, from the sup-
pression of rebellions to a calculated plan for seizing supremacy.

Two sets of texts, one dealing with the goddess and the other
with her surrogate, the king Naram-Sin, record the events of those
times. Both indicate that the first out-of-bounds target of Inanna
was the Landing Place in the Cedar Mountain. As a Flying
Goddess Inanna was quite familiar with the place; she ‘‘burnt
down the great gates” of the mountain and, after a brief siege, ob-
tained the surrender of the troops guarding it: “they disbanded
themselves willingly.”

As recorded in the Naram-Sin inscriptions, Inanna then turned
south along the Mediterranean coast, subduing city after city. The
conquest of Jerusalem — Mission Control Center — is not specifi-

254

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 83

cally mentioned, but Inanna must have been there, too, for it is re-
corded that she had gone on to capture Jericho. Lying astride the
strategic Jordan River crossing and opposite the Anunnaki strong-
hold at Tell Ghassul, Jericho— the city dedicated to Sin— had also
rebelled: “It said not ‘It belongs to your father who begot you’; it
had promised its solemn word, but turned away from it.” The Old
Testament is filled with admonitions against “straying after alien
gods”; the Sumerian text conveys the same transgression: The
people of Jericho, having given a solemn promise to worship Sin,
Inanna’s father, have switched allegience to another, alien, god.
The surrender of this “city of date-palms” to an armed Inanna was
depicted on a cylinder seal (Fig. 84).

With the conquest of southern Canaan, Inanna stood at the gate-
way to the Fourth Region, the region of the Spaceport. Sargon had

Prelude to Disaster

257

Fig. 84

not dared cross the forbidden line. But Naram-Sin, encouraged by
Inanna, did. . . .

A Mesopotamian royal chronicle attests that not only did
Naram-Sin enter the peninsula, but he had gone on to invade the
land of Magan (Egypt):

Naram-Sin, offspring of Sargon, marched against the town of
Apishal and made a breach in its wall, conquering it. He person-
ally caught Rish-Adad, king of Apishal, and the vizier of
Apishal.

He then marched against the country of Magan and personally
caught Mannu-Dannu, king of Magan.

The accuracy of the above-mentioned Babylonian royal chroni-
cle has been independently confirmed in its other details, so there
is no reason to doubt this part of it, too— incredible as it sounds, for
it entailed the passage of a human king and a human army through
the Sinai peninsula, the gods’ own Fourth Region. Since time im-
memorial, a trade route between Asia and Africa had wound its
way along the peninsula’s Mediterranean coast— a route later on
enhanced by the Egyptians with watering stations and by the Ro-
mans as their vital Via Maris. Ancient users of this route thus kept
well away from the central plain where the Spaceport was located.
But whether Naram-Sin, at the head of an army, just marched
through along the coastal route is questionable. Alabaster vases of
Egyptian design, which have been found by archaeologists in Mes-

258

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

opotamia and Elam, identified their owner (in Akkadian) as
“Naram-Sin, King of the Four Regions; vase of the Shining Crown
of the land Magan.” That Naram-Sin began to call himself “King
of the Four Regions” affirms not only the conquest of Egypt but
also suggests the inclusion of the Sinai peninsula in his sphere of
influence. Inanna, it appears, was more than “just passing
through.”

(A foreign invasion, about the time of Naram-Sin, is also known
from Egyptian records. They describe a period of disarray and
chaos. In the words of the papyrus known to Egyptologists as The
Admonitions oflpuwer, “Strangers have come into Egypt ... the
high-bom are full of lamentation.” It was a period that saw the
shift of the center of worship and kingship from Memphis-Heliop-
olis in the north to Thebes in the south. Scholars call the century of
disarray “The First Intermediate Period”; it followed the collapse
of the sixth Pharaonic dynasty.)

How could Inanna, with apparent immunity, intrude on the Sinai
peninsula and invade Egypt unopposed by the gods of Egypt?

The answer lies in an aspect of the Naram-Sin inscriptions that
has baffled the scholars: the apparent veneration by this Mesopota-
mian ruler of the African god Nergal. Although this made no sense
at all, the fact is that the long text known as The Kuthean Legend of
Naram-Sin (or, as it is sometimes called, The King of Kutha Text)
attests that Naram-Sin went to Kutha, Nergal’s cult center in Af-
rica, and erected there a stela to which he affixed an ivory tablet
inscribed with the tale of this unusual visit, all to pay homage to
Nergal.

The recognition by Naram-Sin of Nergal’s power and influence
well beyond Africa is attested by the fact that in treaties made be-
tween Naram-Sin and provincial rulers in Elam, Nergal is invoked
among the witness gods. And in an inscription dealing with
Naram-Sin’s march to the Cedar Mountain in Lebanon, the king
credited Nergal (rather than Ishkur/Adad) with making the achieve-
ment possible:

Although since the era of the rulership of man
none of the kings has ever destroyed Arman and Ebla,

Now did the god Nergal open up the path for the mighty Naram-
Sin.

He gave him Arman and Ebla, presented him with the Amanus
and with the Cedar Mountain and with the Upper Sea.

Prelude to Disaster 259

This puzzling emergence of Nergal as an influential Asian deity,
and the audacious march of Inanna’s surrogate Naram-Sin to
Egypt— all violations of the status quo of the Four Regions estab-
lished after the Pyramid Wars— have one explanation: While Mar-
duk had shifted his attention to Babylon, Nergal assumed a
preeminent role in Egypt. Then, having gone to persuade Marduk
to leave Mesopotamia without further struggle, the amicable part-
ing turned into a bitter enmity between the brothers.

And this led to an alliance between Nergal and Inanna; but as
they stood for each other, they soon found themselves opposed by
all the other gods. An assembly of the gods was held in Nippur to
deal with the disruptive consequences of Inanna’s exploits; even
Enki agreed that she had gone too far. And a decree for her arrest
and trial was issued by Enlil.

We learned of these events from a chronicle titled by scholars
The Curse of Agade. Deciding that Inanna had indeed gotten
out of hand, “the word of the Ekur” (Enlil’s sacred precinct in
Nippur) was issued against her. But Inanna did not wait to be
seized or held for trial: she forsook her temple and escaped
from Agade:

The “word of Ekur” was upon Agade
like a deathly silence;

Agade was all atremble,

its Ulmash temple was in terror;

She who lived there, left the city.

The maiden forsook her chamber;

Holy Inanna forsook her shrine in Agade.

By the time a delegation of the great gods arrived in Agade, they
only found an empty temple; all they could do was strip the place
of its attributes of power:

In days not five, in days not ten,

The crownband of lordship, the tiara of Kingship,
the throne given to rulership
Ninurta brought over to his temple;

Utu carried off the city’s “Eloquence”;

Enki withdrew its “Wisdom.”

Its Awesomeness that could reach the Heaven,

Anu brought up to the midst of Heaven.

260

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

“The kingship of Agade was prostrated, its future was ex-
tremely unhappy.” Then “Naram-Sin had a vision,” a communi-
cation from his goddess Inanna. “He kept it to himself, put it not in
speech, spoke with nobody about it. . . . Seven years Naram-Sin
remained in wait.”

Did Inanna seek out Nergal during her seven-year disappearance
from Agade? The text does not give the answer, but we believe that
it was the only haven available to Inanna, away from Enid's wrath.
The ensuing events suggest that Inanna — even more audacious than
before, more ambitious than ever— must have obtained the backing
of at least one other major god; and that could have been only
Nergal. That Inanna would hide in Nergal’s Lower African domain
seems thus a most plausible assumption.

Did the two, talking over the situation, reviewing past events,
discussing the future, end up forging a new alliance that could rear-
range the divine domains? A New Order was indeed feasible, for
Inanna was shattering the Old Divine Order upon the Earth. A text
whose ancient title was Queen of All the MEs acknowledges that
Inanna had indeed, deliberately, decided to defy the authority of
Anu and Enlil, abrogated their rules and regulations, and declared
herself the Supreme Deity, a “Great Queen of Queens.” Announc-
ing that she “has become greater than the mother who gave birth to
her . . . even greater than Anu,” she followed up her declarations
with deeds and seized the E-Anna (“House of Anu”) in Erech,
aiming to dismantle this symbol of Anu’s authority:

The heavenly kingship was seized by a female . . .

She changed altogether the rules of Holy Anu,

Feared not the great Anu.

She seized the E-Anna from Anu —

that House of irresistible charm, enduring allure—

On that House she brought destruction;

Inanna assaults its people, makes them captive.

The coup d'etat against Anu was accompanied by a parallel at-
tack on Enlil’s seat and symbols of authority. This task was as-
signed by Inanna to Naram-Sin; his attack on the Ekur in Nippur
and the resulting downfall of Agade are detailed in The Curse of
Agade text. From it we gather that after the seven-year wait
Naram-Sin received further oracles and thereupon “changed his
line of action.” Upon receiving the new orders:

Prelude to Disaster

261

He defied the word of Enlil,

Crushed those who had served Enlil,

Mobilized his troops, and

Like a hero accustomed to high-handedness

Put a restraining hand on the Ekur.

Overrunning the seemingly undefended city, “like a bandit he
plundered it.” He then approached the Ekur in the sacred precinct,
“erecting large ladders against the House.” Smashing his way in,
he entered its Holy of Holies: “the people now saw its sacred cella,
a chamber that knew not light; the Akkadians saw the holy vessels
of the god”; Naram-Sin “cast them into the fire.” He “docked
large boats at the quay by the House of Enlil, and carried off the
possessions of the city.” The horrible sacrilege was complete.

Enlil— his whereabouts unstated, but clearly away from Nip-
pur— “lifted his eyes” and saw the destruction of Nippur and the
defilement of the Ekur. “Because his beloved Ekur had been at-
tacked,” he ordered the hordes of Gutium— a mountainland to the
northeast of Mesopotamia — to attack Akkad and lay it waste. They
came down upon Akkad and its cities “in vast numbers, like lo-
custs . . . nothing escaped their arm.” “He who slept on the roof
died on the roof; he who slept inside the house was not brought to
burial . . . heads were crushed, mouths were crushed ... the
blood of the treacherous flowed over the blood of the faithful.”

Once, and then a second time, the other gods interceded with
Enlil: “curse Agade with a baleful curse,” they said, but let the
other cities and the farmlands survive! When Enlil finally agreed,
eight great gods joined in putting a curse on Agade, “the city who
dared assault the Ekur.” “And lo,” said the ancient historian, “so
it came to pass . . . Agade is destroyed!” The gods decreed that
Agade be wiped off the face of the Earth; and unlike other cities
that, having been destroyed, were rebuilt and resettled, Agade for-
ever remained desolate.

As to Inanna, “her heart was appeased” finally by her parents.
What exactly happened, the texts do not state. They tell us, how-
ever, that her father Nannar came forth to fetch her back to Sumer
while “her mother Ningal proffered prayers for her, greeted her
back at the temple’s doorstep.” “Enough, more than enough inno-
vations, O great queen!” the gods and the people appealed to her:
“and the foremost Queen, in her assembly, accepted the prayer.”
The Era of Ishtar was over.

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

All the textual evidence suggests that Enlil and Ninurta were
away from Mesopotamia when Naram-Sin attacked Nippur. But
the hordes that swept down from the mountains upon Akkad were
“the hordes of Enlil,” and they were in all probability guided into
the great Mesopotamian plain by Ninurta.

The Sumerian King Lists call the land from which the invaders
came Gutium, a land in the mountains northeast of Mesopotamia.
In the Legend of Naram-Sin they are called Umman-Manda (possi-
bly “Hordes of Far/Strong Brothers”), who came from “camps in
the dwelling of Enlil” situated “in the mountainland whose city
the gods had built.” Verses in the text suggest that they were
descendants of soldiers who had accompanied Enmerkar on his
distant travels, who “slew their host” and were punished by
Utu/Shamash to remain in exile. Now tribes great in number, led
by seven chieftain brothers, they were commanded by Enlil to
overrun Mesopotamia and “hurl themselves against the people
who in Nippur had killed.”

For a while feeble successors to Naram-Sin attempted to main-
tain a central rule as the hordes began to overrun city after city. The
confused situation is described in the Sumerian King Lists with the
statement: “Who was king? Who was not king? Was Irgigi king?
Was Nanum king? Was Imi king? Was Elulu king?’” In the end
the Gutians seized control of the whole of Sumer and Akkad;
“Kingship by the hordes of Gutium was carried off.”

For ninety-one years and forty days the Gutians held sway over
Mesopotamia. No new capital is named for them, and it appears
that Lagash— the only Sumerian city to escape despoiling by the in-
vaders— served as their headquarters. From his seat in Lagash
Ninurta undertook the slow process of restoring the country’s agri-
culture and primarily the irrigation system that collapsed following
the Erra/Marduk incident. It was a chapter in Sumerian history that
can best be called the Era of Ninurta.

The focal point of that era was Lagash, a city whose beginnings
were as a “sacred precinct” (the Girsu) for Ninurta and his Divine
Black Bird. But as the turmoil of human and divine ambitions
grew, Ninurta decided to convert Lagash into a major Sumerian
center, the principal abode for himself and his spouse Bau/Gula
(Fig. 85), where his ideas of law and order and his ideals of moral-
ity and justice could be practiced. To assist in these tasks Ninurta
appointed in Lagash human viceroys and charged them with the ad-
ministration and defense of the city-state.

Prelude to Disaster

263

Fig. 85

The history of Lagash (a site nowadays called Tello) records
a dynasty whose reign— uninterrupted for half a millennium—
began three centuries before the rise of Sargon. An island of
armed stability in an increasingly violent environment, Lagash
was also a great center of Sumerian culture. While Sumer’s reli-
gious holidays emanated from Nippur, Lagash originated tradi-
tions of festivals tied to an agricultural calendar, such as the
Festival of First Fruits. Its scribes and scholars perfected the
Sumerian language; and its rulers, to whom Ninurta granted the
title “Righteous Governor,” were sworn to a code of justice and
morality.

Prominent among the very first rulers of the long dynasty of La-
gash was one named Ur-Nanshe (circa 2600 b.c.). More than fifty
of his inscriptions were found in the ruins of Lagash; they record
the bringing of building materials for the Girsu, including special
timbers from Tilmun for the temple’s furnishings. They also de-
scribe extensive irrigation works, the digging of canals, and the
raising of dykes. On one of his tablets Ur-Nanshe is depicted head-
ing a construction team, not loath to do some manual work himself
(Fig. 8$). The forty known viceroys who followed him left a
written record of achievements in agriculture, construction, social
legislation, and ethical reforms— material and moral achievements
that would make any government proud.

Fig. 86

But Lagash had escaped the ravages of the turbulent years of
Sargon and Naram-Sin not only because it was the “cult center”
of Ninurta, but also (and primarily) because of the military prowess
of its people. As “Enid's Foremost Warrior,” Ninurta made sure
that those selected by him to govern Lagash should be militarily
proficient. One (named Eannatum) whose inscriptions and stelae
have been found, was a master tactician and victorious general.
The stelae show him riding a war chariot— a military vehicle whose
introduction has been customarily attributed to later times; they
also show his helmeted troops in tight formations (Fig. 87).

Commenting on this, Maurice Lambert (La Periode Pre-Sar-
gonique) wrote that “this infantry of spearmen, protected by shield-
bearers, gave the army of Lagash a defence most solid and an attack
most rapid and versatile.” The resulting victories of Eannatum even
impressed Inanna/Ishtar, so much so that she had fallen in love with
him; and “because she loved Eannatum, kingship over Kish she gave
him, in addition to the governorship of Lagash.” With this Eannatum
became the LU.GAL (“Great Man”) of Sumer; and holding the land
in a military grip, he made law and order prevail.

Fig. 87

Ironically the chaotic period that had preceded Sargon of Agade
found in Lagash not a strong military leader but a social reformer
named Urukagina. He devoted his efforts to a moral revival and to
the introduction of laws based on fairness and justice, rather than
on a crime-punishment concept. Under him, Lagash proved too
weak to maintain law and order in the land. His weakness enabled
Inanna to bring the ambitious Lugal-zagesi of Umma to Erech, in
an attempt to restore her countrywide dominion. But the failings of
Lugal-zagesi led (as we have already described) to his downfall by
the hand of Inanna’ s new choice, Sargon.

Throughout the period of the primacy of Agade, governorship
continued uninterrupted in Lagash; even the great Sargon skirted
Lagash and left it intact. It escaped destruction and occupation
throughout the upheavals of Naram-Sin, primarily because it was a
formidable military stronghold, fortified and refortified to with-

266

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

stand all attacks. We learn from an inscription by Ur-Bau, the vice-
roy at Lagash at the time of the Naram-Sin upheavals, that he was
instructed by Ninurta to reinforce the walls of the Girsu and to
strengthen the enclosure of the Imdugud aircraft. Ur-Bau “com-
pacted the soil to be as stone . . . fired clay to be as metal”; and at
the Imdugud’s platform “replaced the old soil with a new founda-
tion,” strengthened with huge timber beams and stones imported
from afar.

When the Gutians left Mesopotamia— circa 2160 b.c.— Lagash
burst into new bloom and produced some of Sumer’s most enlight-
ened and best-known rulers. Of these, one of the best-known from
his long inscriptions and many statues was Gudea, who reigned
during the twenty-second century b.c. His was a time of peace and
prosperity; his records speak not of armies and wars but of trade
and reconstruction. He crowned his activities with the building of a
new, magnificent temple for Ninurta in a vastly enlarged Girsu.
According to Gudea’s inscriptions, “the Lord of Girsu” appeared
unto him in a vision, standing beside his Divine Black Bird. The
god expressed to him the wish that a new E.NINNU (“House of
Fifty”— Ninurta’s numerical rank) be built by Gudea. Gudea was
given two sets of divine instructions: one from a goddess who in
one hand “held the tablet of the favorable star of heavens” and
with the other “held a holy stylus,” with which she indicated to
Gudea “the favorable planet” in whose direction the temple
should be oriented. The other set of instructions came from a god
whom Gudea did not recognize and who turned out to have been
Ningishzidda. He handed to Gudea a tablet made of precious
stone; “the plan of a temple it contained.” One of Gudea’s statues
depicts him seated with this tablet on his knees, the divine stylus
beside it (Fig. 88).

Gudea admits that he needed the help of diviners and “searchers
of secrets” to understand the temple plan. It was, as modem re-
searchers have found, an ingenious one-in-seven architectural plan
for the construction of a ziggurat as a seven-stage pyramid. The
structure contained a strongly reinforced platform for the landing
of Ninurta’s airborne vehicle.

The participation of Ningishzidda in the planning of the E-
Ninnu carried a significance that went beyond mere architectural
assistance, as evidenced by the fact that the Girsu included a spe-
cial shrine for this god. Associated with healing and magical pow-
ers, Ningishzidda — a son of Enki — was deemed in Sumerian
inscriptions to have known how to secure the foundations of tern-

Fig. 88

pies; he was “the great god who held the plans.” As we have al-
ready suggested, Ningishzidda was none other than Thoth, the
Egyptian god of magical powers who was appointed guardian of
the secret plans of the pyramids of Giza.

Ninurta, it will be recalled, had carried off with him some of the
“stones” from within the Great Pyramid when the Pyramid Wars
ended. Now, with the thwarted efforts of Inanna and then Marduk
to lord over gods and men, Ninurta wished to reaffirm his “Rank
of Fifty” by the erection of a step-pyramid for himself at Lagash,
an edifice to be known as the “House of Fifty.” It was forthat rea-
son, we believe, that Ninurta invited Ningishzidda/Thoth to come
to Mesopotamia, to design for him a pyramid that could be built
and raised high, not with massive stone blocks as in Egypt, but
with the humble clay bricks of Mesopotamia.

268 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

The stay of Ningishzidda in Sumer and his collaboration there
with Ninurta were commemorated not only in shrines to that visit-
ing god, but also in numerous artistic depictions, some of which
were discovered during the sixty years of archaeological work at
Tello. One of these (Fig. 89a) combined the emblem of Ninurta’s
Divine Bird with the serpents of Ningishzidda; another (Fig. 89b)
depicted Ninurta as an Egyptian Sphinx.

The time of Gudea and the Ninurta-Ningishzidda collaboration
coincides with the so-called First Intermediate Period in Egypt,
when the kings of the IX and X dynasties (2160 to 2040 b.c.) aban-
doned the worship of Osiris and Horns and moved the capital from
Memphis to a city the Greeks later called Heracleopolis. The de-
parture of Thoth from Egypt may thus have been an aspect of the
upheavals occurring there, as was his subsequent disappearance
from Sumer. Ningishzidda (to quote E. D. van Buren, The God
Ningizzida) was “a god called forth from obscurity in Gudea’s

Prelude to Disaster 269

time,” only to become a “phantom god” and a mere memory in
later (Babylonian and Assyrian) times.

The Era of Ninurta in Sumer, lasting through the Gutian inva-
sion and the ensuing period of reconstruction, was only an inter-
lude. A mountain dweller at heart, Ninurta soon began to roam the
skies again in his Divine Black Bird, visiting his rugged domains in
the northeast and even farther away. Constantly perfecting the
martial arts of his highland tribesmen, he gave them mobility
through the introduction of cavalry, thereby extending their reach
by hundreds and even thousands of miles.

He had returned to Mesopotamia at Enlil’s call, to put an end to
the sacrilege perpetrated by Naram-Sin and to the upheavals caused
by Inanna. With peace and prosperity restored, Ninurta again ab-
sented himself from Sumer; and, never one to give up, Inanna
seized upon this absence to regain the kingship for Erech.

The attempt lasted only a few years, for Anu and Enlil did not
condone her deed. But the tale (contained in an enigmatic text on a
partly broken tablet catalogued as Ashur- 13955) is most fascinat-
ing; it reads like an ancient legend of the Excalibur (King Arthur’s
magical sword, which was imbedded in a rock and could be pulled
out only by the one who was chosen for kingship); and it throws
light on preceding events, including the incident by which Sargon
had offended Marduk.

We learn that when “Kingship was lowered from Heaven” to
begin at Kish, Anu and Enlil established there a “Pavilion of
Heaven.” “In its foundation soil, for all days to come,” they
implanted the SHU. HA. DA. KU— an artifact made of alloyed
metal whose name translates literally “Supreme Strong Bright Weap-
on.” This divine object was taken to Erech when kingship was
transferred there from Kish; it was moved about as kingship moved
about but only when the change was decreed by the Great Gods.

In accordance with this custom, Sargon carried the object to
Agade. But Marduk protested, because Agade was a brand-new
city and not one of the cities selected by “the great gods of Heaven
and Earth” to be royal capitals. The gods who chose Agade—
Inanna and her supporters — were in Marduk’s opinion “rebels,
gods who wear unclean clothing.”

It was to cure this defect that Sargon went to Babylon to the spot
where its “hallowed soil” was located. The idea was to remove
some of that soil “to a place in front of Agade,” there to implant
the Divine Weapon and thus legitimize its presence in Agade. It

270

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

was in punishment for this, the text states, that Marduk instigated
rebellions against Sargon and also inflicted upon him a “restless-
ness” (some take the term to mean “insomnia”) which led to his
death.

We read further in the enigmatic text that during the Gutian oc-
cupation that followed Naram-Sin’s reign, the divine object lay un-
touched “beside the dam-works for the waters” because “they
knew not how to carry out the rules regarding the divine artifact.”
It was at that time Marduk’s contention that the object had to re-
main in its assigned place, “without being opened up,” and “not
being offered to any god,” until “the gods who brought the de-
struction shall make restitution.” But when Inanna seized the
opportunity to reinstitute kingship in Erech, her chosen king, Utu-
Hegal, “seized the Shuhadaku in its place of resting; into his hand
he took it”— although “the end of the restitution has not yet oc-
curred.” Unauthorized, Uthu-Hegal “raised the weapon against
the city he was besieging.” As soon as he had done that, he fell
dead. “The river carried off his sunken body.”

Ninurta’s absences from Sumer and Inanna’s abortive attempt to
recapture the kingship for Erech indicated to Enlil that the matter of
the divine governing of Sumer could no longer be left open-ended;
and the most suitable candidate for the task was Nannar/Sin.

Throughout the turbulent times he was overshadowed by more
aggressive contenders for the supremacy, including his own
daughter Inanna. Now he was finally given the opportunity to as-
sume the status befitting him as the firstborn (on Earth) of Enlil.
The era that followed — let us call it the Era of Nannar — was one of
the most glorious in Sumerian annals; it was also Sumer’s last hur-
rah.

His first order of business was to make his city, Ur, a great me-
tropolis and the capital of a vast empire. Appointing a new line of
rulers, known by scholars as the Third Dynasty of Ur, Nannar
achieved for this capital and for Sumerian civilization unprece-
dented peaks of material and cultural advancements. From an im-
mense ziggurat that dominated the walled city (Fig. 90)— a ziggurat
whose crumbled remains, after more than four thousand years, still
rise awesomely from the Mesopotamian plain— Nannar and his
spouse Ningal took an active part in the affairs of state. Attended
by a hierarchy of priests and functionaries (headed by the king,
Fig. 91), they guided the city’s agriculture to become the granary
of Sumer; directed its sheep breeding to make Ur the wool and gar-

272

V

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

ment center of the ancient Near East; and developed a foreign trade
by land and water that made the merchants of Ur remembered for
millennia thereafter. To service this thriving trade and the far-flung
links, as well as to improve the city’s defenses, the city’s surround-
ing wall was in turn surrounded by a navigable canal, serving two
harbors— a West Harbor and a North Harbor— with an inner canal
connecting the two harbors and in turn separating the sacred pre-
cinct and the palace and administrative quarter from the residential
and commercial parts of the city (Fig. 92). It was a city whose
white houses— many of them multistoried (Fig. 93)— shined as a
pearl from a distance; whose streets were straight and wide, with
many a shrine at their intersections; a city of an industrious people
with a smooth-functioning administration; a city of pious people,
never failing to pray to their benevolent deities.

The first ruler of the Third Dynasty of Ur, Ur-Nammu (“The
Joy of Ur”) was no mere mortal: he was semi-divine, his mother
being the goddess Ninsun. His extensive records state that as soon
as “Anu and Enlil had turned over kingship to Nannarat Ur,” and
Ur-Nammu was selected to be the "Righteous Shepherd” of the
people, the gods ordered Ur-Nammu to institute a new moral re-
vival. The nearly three centuries that had passed since the moral re-
vival under Urukagina of Lagash witnessed the rise and fall of
Akkad, the defying of the authority of Anu, and the defilement of
Enlil’s Ekur. Injustice, oppression, and immorality had become
the common behavior. At Ur, under Ur-Nammu, an attempt was
launched once again by Enlil to steer mankind away from “evil
ways” to a course of “righteousness.” Proclaiming a new code of
justice and social behavior, Ur-Nammu “established equity in the
land, banished malediction, ended violence and strife.”

Expecting so much from this New Beginning, Enlil— for the first
time— entrusted the guardianship of Nippur to Nannar and gave
Ur-Nammu the necessary instructions for the restoration of the
Ekur (which was damaged by Naram-Sin). Ur-Nammu marked the
occasion by erecting a stela, showing him carrying the tools and
basket of a builder (Fig. 94). When the work was completed, Enlil
and Ninlil returned to Nippur to reside in their restored abode.
“Enlil and Ninlil were happy there,” a Sumerian inscription
stated.

The Retum-to-Righteous-Ways involved not only social justice
among people, but also proper worship of the gods. To that effect
Ur-Nammu, in addition to the great works in Ur, also restored and
enlarged the edifices dedicated to Anu and Inanna at Erech, to

274

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 93

Ninsun (his mother) at Ur, to Utu at Larsa, to Ninharsag at Adab;
he also engaged in some repair work at Eridu, Enki’s city. Con-
spicuously absent from the list are Ninurta’s Lagash and Marduk’s
Babylon.

The social reforms of Ur-Nammu and Ur’s achievements in
commerce and industry have led scholars to view the times of the
Third Dynasty as a period not only of prosperity, but also of peace.
They were thus puzzled to find in the mins of Ur two panels de-
picting its citizens’ activities— one a Peace Panel, and the other,
surprisingly, a War Panel (Fig. 95). The image of the people of Ur
as trained and ready warriors seemed totally out of place.

Yet the facts, as told by the archaeological evidence of weap-
onry, military garb, and chariots of war, as well as in numerous in-
scriptions, belie the image of pacifism. Indeed, one of the first acts

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

of Ur-Nammu was to subdue Lagash and slay its governor, then
occupy seven other cities.

The need for military measures was not limited to the initial phas-
es of the ascendancy of Nannar and Ur. We know from inscrip-
tions that after Ur and Sumer “enjoyed days of prosperity [and]
rejoiced greatly with Ur-Nammu,” after Ur-Nammu then rebuilt the
Ekur in Nippur, Enlil found him worthy of holding the Divine
Weapon; with it Ur-Nammu was to subdue “evil cities” in “for-
eign lands”:

The Divine Weapon,
that which in the hostile lands
heaps up the rebels in piles,
to Ur-Nammu, the Shepherd,

He, the Lord Enlil, has given it to him;

Like a bull to crush the foreign land.

Like a lion to hunt it down;

To destroy the evil cities,

Clear them of opposition to the Lofty.

These are words reminiscent of biblical prophecies of divine
wrath, through the medium of mortal kings, against “evil cities”
and “sinful people”; they reveal that beneath the cloak of prosper-
ity there was lurking a renewed warfare among the gods — a strug-
gle for the allegiance of the masses of mankind.

The sad fact is that Ur-Nammu himself, becoming a mighty war-
rior, “The Might of Nannar,” met a tragic death on the battlefield.
“The enemy land revolted, the enemy land acted hostilely”; in a
battle in that unnamed but distant land, Ur-Nammu’s chariot got
stuck in the mud; Ur-Nammu fell off it; “the chariot like a storm
rushed along,” leaving Ur-Nammu behind, “abandoned on the
battlefield like a crushed jug.” The tragedy was compounded
when the boat returning his body to Sumer “in an unknown place
had sunk; the waves sank it down, with him [Ur-Nammu] aboard.”

When the news reached Ur, a great lament went up there; the
people could not understand how such a Righteous Shepherd, one
who had been just for the people and true to the gods, could have
met such a disgraceful end. They could not understand why “the
Lord Nannar did not hold him by the hand, why Inanna, Lady of
Heaven, did not put her noble arm around his head, why the valiant
Utu did not assist him.” Why had these gods “step[ped] aside”

Prelude to Disaster 277

when Ur-Nammu’s bitter fate was determined? Surely it was a be-
trayal by the great gods:

How the fate of the hero has been changed!

Anu altered his holy word . . .

Enlil deceitfully changed his fate-decree . . .

The manner in which Ur-Nammu had died (209^ b.c.) may have
accounted for the behavior of his successor, of whom one can use
the biblical contempt for a king who “prostituted himself” and
“did that which was evil in the view of the Lord.” Named Shulgi,
he was bom under divine auspices: it was Nannar himself who had
arranged for the child to be conceived at Enlil ’s shrine in Nippur,
through a union between Ur-Nammu and Enlil ’s high priestess, so
that “a little ‘Enlil’ ... a child suitable for kingship and throne,
shall be conceived.”

The new king began his long reign by choosing to keep together
his far-flung empire through peaceful means and religious recon-
ciliation. As soon as he ascended the throne, he embarked on the
building (or rebuilding) of a temple for Ninurta in Nippur; this en-
abled him to declare Ur and Nippur to be “Brother-Cities.” He
then built a ship— naming it after Ninlil — and sailed to the “Land
of Flying for Life.” His poems indicate that he imagined himself a
second Gilgamesh, following in that earlier king’s footsteps to the
“Land of Living”— to the Sinai peninsula.

Landing at “The Place of the Ramp” (or “Land-fill Place”),
Shulgi built there an altar to Nannar. Continuing his journey on
land, Shulgi reached the Harsag — Ninharsag’s High Mountain in
the southern Sinai — and built there an altar, too. Winding his way
in the peninsula, he reached the place called BAD.GAL.DINGIR
( Dur-Mah-Ilu in Akkadian), “The Great Fortified Place of the
Gods.” He now was indeed emulating Gilgamesh, for Gilgamesh,
arriving from the direction of the Dead Sea, had also stopped to
pray and make offerings to the gods at that gateway place, situated
between the Negev and the Sinai proper. There Shulgi built an altar
to the “God Who Judges.”

It was the eighth year of Shulgi’s reign as he began the journey
back to Sumer. His route via the Fertile Crescent began in Canaan
and Lebanon, where he built altars at the “Place of Bright Ora-
cles” and “The Snow-covered Place.” It was a deliberately slow
journey, intended to strengthen the imperial bonds with the distant
provinces. It was as a result of this journey that Shulgi built a net-

278

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

work of roads that held the empire together politically and
militarily and also enhanced trade and prosperity. Getting person-
ally acquainted with the local chieftains, Shulgi further cemented
his ties with them by arranging marriages for his daughters.

Shulgi returned to Sumer, boasting that he had learned four for-
eign languages. His imperial prestige was at its peak. In gratitude
he built for Nannar/Sin a shrine in the sacred precinct of Nippur. In
return he was rewarded with the titles “High Priest of Anu, Priest
of Nannar.” Shulgi recorded the two ceremonies on his cylinder
seals (Figs. 96, 97).

Fig. 9(5

Fig. 97

But as time went by, Shulgi increasingly preferred the luxuries
of Ur to the rigors of the provinces, leaving their government to
Grand Emissaries. He spent his time composing self-laudatory
hymns, imagining himself a demigod. His delusions eventually

■

Prelude to Disaster

279

caught the attention of the greatest seductress of all— Inanna. Sens-
ing a new opportunity, she invited Shulgi to Erech, making him “a
man chosen for the vulva of Inanna” and engaging in lovemaking
in the very temple dedicated to Anu. We quote Shulgi’s own
words:

With valiant Utu, a friend as a brother,

I drank strong drink

in the temple founded by Anu.

My minstrels sang for me the seven songs of love.

Inanna, the queen, the vulva of heaven and earth,
was by my side, banqueting in the temple.

As the unavoidable restiveness at home and abroad grew, Shulgi
sought military support from the southeastern province of Elam.
Arranging for his daughter to marry Elam’s viceroy, Shulgi gave
him as dowiy the city of Larsa. In return the viceroy brought into
Sumer Elamite troops, to serve Shulgi as a Foreign Legion. But in-
stead of peace the Elamite troops brought more warfare, and the
yearly records of Shulgi’s reign speak of repeated destruction in the
northern provinces. Shulgi attempted to retain his hold on the west-
ern provinces by peaceful means, and his thirty-seventh year of
reign records a treaty with a local king named Puzur-Ish-Dagan — a
name with clear Canaanite/Philistine connotations. The treaty en-
abled Shulgi to reclaim the title “King of the Four Regions.” But
the peace in the west did not last long. In his forty-first year (2055
b.c.) Shulgi received certain oracles from Nannar/Sin, and a major
military expedition was launched against the Canaanite provinces.
Within two years Shulgi could claim once more that he was “Hero,
King of Ur, Ruler of the Four Regions.”

The evidence suggests that Elamite troops were used in this
campaign to subdue the provinces and that these foreign troops had
advanced as far as the gateway to the Sinai. Their commander
called himself “favorite of the God Who Judges, beloved by
Inanna, occupier of Dur-Ilu.” But no sooner had the occupying
troops withdrawn than the unrest began again. In the year 2049
b.c. Shulgi ordered the building of “The Wall of the West” to pro-
tect Mesopotamia.

He stayed on the throne one more shaky year. Although, until
the end of his reign, Shulgi continued to proclaim himself “a cher-
ished of Nannar,” he was no longera “chosen” of Anu and Enlil.
In their recorded view “the divine regulations he did not cany out.

280

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

his righteousness he dirtied.” Therefore, they decreed for him the
“death of a sinner.” The year was 2048 b.c.

Shulgi’s successor on the throne of Ur was his son Amar-Sin.
Though the first two years of his reign were recalled by their war-
fare, three years of peace did follow. But in the sixth year an upris-
ing needed subduing in the northern district of Ashur, and in the
seventh year— 2041 b.c.— a major military campaign was required
to suppress four western localities and “their lands.”

The campaign, apparently, was not too successful, for it was not
followed by the customary bestowal of titles on the king by
Nannar. Instead we find that Amar-Sin turned his attention to
Eridu— Enki’s city!— establishing there a royal residence and as-
suming there priestly functions. This twist in religious filialties
might have been prompted by the practical desire to gain control of
Eridu’s shipyards; for in the following (ninth) year, Amar-Sin set
sail to the same “Place of the Ramp” where Shulgi had gone. But
reaching the “Land of Flying for Life” he got no farther: he died
of a scorpion’s (or snake’s) bite.

He was replaced on the throne by his brother Shu-Sin. The nine
years of his reign (2038-2030 b.c.), though recording two military
forays against northern localities, were more conspicuous by their
defensive measures. These included the strengthening of the Wall
of the West against the Amorites and the construction of two ships:
the Great Ship and the “Ship of the Abzu.” It looks as though
Shu-Sin was preparing an escape by sea. . . .

When the next (and last) king of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, ascended the
throne, raiders from the west were clashing with the Elamite mer-
cenaries in Mesopotamia proper. Soon Sumer’s heartland was un-
der siege; the people of Ur and Nippur were huddled behind
protective walls, and the influence of Nannar had shrunk to a small
enclave.

Waiting in the wings, as once before, was Marduk. Believing
that his time for supremacy had finally come, he left his land of ex-
ile and led his followers back to Babylon.

And then Awesome Weapons were unleashed, and disaster—
unlike any that befell mankind since the Deluge— struck.

13

ABRAHAM:

THE FATEFUL YEARS

And it came to pass

in the days of Amraphel king of Shin'ar,

Ariokh king of Ellasar,

Khedorla’omer king of Elam,
and Tidhal king of Go’im —

That these made war

with Bera King of Sodom,

and with Birsha king of Gomorrah,

Shinab king of Admah,

and Shem-eber king of Zebi'im,

and with the king of Bela, which is Zoar.

Thus begins the biblical tale, in chapter 14 of Genesis, of an an-
cient war that pitted an alliance of four kingdoms of the East
against five kings in Canaan. It is a tale that has evoked some of the
most intense debate among scholars, for it connects the story of
Abraham, the first Hebrew Patriarch, with a specific non-Hebrew
event, and thus affords objective substantiation of the biblical rec-
ord of the birth of a nation.

How wonderful it would have been, many have felt, if the vari-
ous kings could be identified and the exact time of Abraham estab-
lished! But even if Elam was known and Shin’ar identified as
Sumer, who were the kings named, and which were the other lands
of the East? Questioning the authenticity of biblical history unless
independently verified, critics of the Bible asked: Why don't we
find the names Khedorla’omer, Amraphel, Ariokh, and Tidhal
mentioned in Mesopotamian inscriptions? And if they did not
exist, if such a war had not taken place, how credible is the rest of
the tale of Abraham?

For many decades the critics of the Old Testament seemed to
prevail; then, as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the
scholarly and religious worlds were astounded by the discovery of

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Babylonian tablets naming Khedorla’omer, Ariokh, and Tidhal in
a tale not unlike the biblical one.

The discovery was announced in a lecture by Theophilus
Pinches to the Victoria Institute, London, in 1897. Having exam-
ined several tablets belonging to the Spartoli Collection in the Brit-
ish Museum, he found that they described a war of wide-ranging
magnitude, in which a king of Elam, named Kudur-laghamar, led
an alliance of rulers that included one called Eri-aku and another
named Tud-ghula— names that easily could have been transformed
into Hebrew as Khedor-la’omer, Ariokh, and Tidhal. Accompa-
nying his published lecture with a painstaking transcript of the
cuneiform writing and a translation thereof. Pinches could confi-
dently claim that the biblical tale had indeed been supported by an
independent Mesopotamian source.

With justified excitement the Assyriologists of that time agreed
with Pinches’s reading of the cuneiform names. The tablets indeed
spoke of “Kudur-Laghamar, king of the land of Elam”— uncan-
nily similar to the biblical ‘‘Khedorla’omer, king of Elam”; all
scholars agreed that it was a perfect Elamite royal name, the prefix
Kudur (“Servant”) having been a component in the names of sev-
eral Elamite kings, and Laghamar being the Elamite epithet-name
for a certain deity. It was agreed that the second name, spelled Eri-
e-a-ku in the Babylonian cuneiform script, stood for the original
Sumerian ERI.AKU, meaning “Servant of the god Aku,” Aku
being a variant of the name of Nannar/Sin. It is known from a num-
ber of inscriptions that Elamite rulers of Larsa bore the name “Ser-
vant of Sin,” and there was therefore little difficulty in agreeing
that the biblical Ellasar, the royal city of the king Ariokh, was in
fact Larsa. There was also unanimous agreement among the schol-
ars for accepting that the Babylonian text’s Tud-ghula was the
equivalent of the biblical “Tidhal, king of Go’im”; and they
agreed that by Go’im the Book of Genesis referred to the “nation-
hordes” whom the cuneiform tablets listed as allies of
Khedorla’omer.

Here, then, was the missing proof— not only of the veracity of
the Bible and of the existence of Abraham, but also of an interna-
tional event in which he had been involved!

But the excitement was not to last. “Unfortunately”— to use an
expression of A. H. Sayce in an address to the Society of Biblical
Archaeology eleven years later— a contemporary discovery, which
should have upheld the one announced by Pinches, ended up side-
tracking and even discrediting it.

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283

The second discovery was announced by Vincent Scheil, who
reported that he had found among the tablets in the Imperial Otto-
man Museum in Constantinople a letter from the well-known
Babylonian king Hammurabi, which mentions the very same
Kudur-laghamar! Because the letter was addressed to a king of
Larsa, Father Scheil concluded that the three were contemporaries
and thus matched three of the four biblical kings of the East— Ham-
murabi being none other than “Amraphel, king of Shin’ar.”

For a while it seemed that all the pieces of the puzzle had fallen
into place; one can still find textbooks and biblical commentaries
explaining that Amraphel stands for Hammurabi. The resulting
conclusion that Abraham was a contemporary of this ruler seemed
plausible, because it was then believed that Hammurabi reigned
from 2067 to 2025 b.c., placing Abraham, the war of the kings,
and the ensuing destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah at the end of
the third millennium b.c.

However, when subsequent research convinced most scholars
that Hammurabi reigned much later (from 1792 to 1750 b.c., ac-
cording to The Cambridge Ancient History), the synchronization
seemingly achieved by Scheil fell apart, and the whole bearing of
the discovered inscriptions — even those reported by Pinches —
came into doubt. Ignored were the pleas of Pinches that no matter
with whom the three named kings were to be identified — that even
if Khedorla’omer, Ariokh, and Tidhal of the cuneiform texts were
not contemporaries of Hammurabi— the text’s tale with its three
names was still "a remarkable historical coincidence, and deserves
recognition as such.” In 1917, Alfred Jeremias (Die sogenanten
Kedorlaomer-Texte) attempted to revive interest in the subject; but
the scholarly community preferred to treat the Spartoli tablets with
benign neglect.

They remained ignored in the basement of the British Museum
for half a century, when M. C. Astour returned to the subject in a
study at Brandeis University (Political and Cosmic Symbolism in
Genesis 14). Agreeing that the biblical and Babylonian editors of
the respective texts drew from some older, common Mesopotamian
source, he identified the four Kings of the East as known rulers: 1) of
Babylon in the eighth century b.c.; 2) of Assyria in the thirteenth cen-
tury b.c.; 3) of the Hittites in the sixteenth century b.c.; and 4) of
Elam in the twelfth century b.c. As none were contemporaries of each
other or of Abraham, he ingeniously suggested that the text was not a
historical one but a work of religious philosophy, wherein the author
used four diverse historic incidents to illustrate one moral (the fate of

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evil kings). The improbability of Astour’s suggestion was soon
pointed out in other scholarly publications; and with that, the interest
in the Khedorla ’omer Texts died again.

Yet the scholarly consensus that the biblical tale and the Babylonian
texts drew on a much earlier, common source impels us to revive the
plea of Pinches and his central argument: How can cuneiform texts,
affirming the biblical background of a major war and naming three of
the biblical kings, be ignored? Should the evidence— crucial, as we
shall show, to the understanding of fateful years— be discarded simply
because Amraphel was not Hammurabi?

The answer is that the Hammurabi letter found by Scheil should
not have sidetracked the discovery reported by Pinches, because
Scheil misread the letter. According to his rendition, Hammurabi
promised a reward to Sin-Idinna, the king of Larsa, for his “hero-
ism on the day of Khedorla’omer.” This implied that the two were
allies in a war against Khedorla’omer and thus contemporaries of
that king of Elam. It was on this point that Scheil’s find was dis-
credited, for it contradicted both the biblical assertion that the three
kings were allies and known historical facts: Hammurabi treated
Larsa not as an ally but as an adversary, boasting that he “over-
threw Larsa in battle,’’ and attacked its sacred precinct “with the
mighty weapon which the gods had given him.”

A close examination of the actual text of Hammurabi’s letter re-
veals that in his eagerness to prove the Hammurabi-Amraphel
identification, Father Scheil reversed the letter’s meaning: Ham-
murabi was not offering as a reward to return certain goddesses to
the sacred precinct (the Emutbal) of Larsa; rather, he was demand-
ing their return to Babylon from Larsa:

To Sin-Idinna

speaks thus Hammurabi regarding
the goddesses who in Emutbal
have been behind doors
from the days of Kudur-Laghamar,
in sackcloth attired:

When they ask them back from thee,
to my men hand them over;

The men shall grasp the hands of the goddesses;

To their abode they shall bring them.

The incident of the abduction of the goddesses had thus occurred
in earlier times; they were held captive in the Emutbal “from the

Abraham: The Fateful Years

285

days of Khedorla’omer”; and Hammurabi was now demanding
their return to Babylon, from where Khedorla’omer had taken them
captive. This can only mean that Khedorla’omer’s days were long
before Hammurabi’s time.

Supporting our reading of the Hammurabi letter found by Father
Scheil in the Constantinople Museum is the fact that Hammurabi
repeated the demand for the return of the goddesses to Babylon in
yet another stiff message to Sin-Idinna, this time sending it by the
hand of high military officers. This second letter is in the British
Museum (No. 23,131) and its text was published by L. W. King in
The Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi:

Unto Sin-Idinna thus sayeth Hammurabi:

I am now despatching Zikir-ilishu, the Transport Officer,

and Hammurabi-bani, the Frontline Officer,

that they may bring the goddesses who are in Emutbal.

That the goddesses were to be returned from Larsa to Babylon is
made clear in the letter’s further instructions:

Thou shalt cause the goddesses to journey
in a processional boat as in a shrine,
that they may come to Babylon.

The temple-women shall accompany them.

For food of the goddesses thou shalt load
pure cream and cereals unto the boat;
sheep and provisions thou shalt put on board
for the sustenance of the temple- women,

[enough] for the journey to reach Babylon.

And thou shalt appoint men to tow the boat,
and chosen soldiers to bring the goddesses
to Babylon in safety.

Delay them not; let them speedily reach Babylon.

It is thus clear from these letters that Hammurabi— a foe, not an
ally, of Larsa— was seeking restitution for events that had hap-
pened long before his time, in the days of Kudur-Laghamar, the
Elamite regent of Larsa. The texts of the Hammurabi letters thus
affirm the existence of Khedorla’omer and of Elamite reign in
Larsa (“Ellasar”), and thus of key elements in the biblical tale.
Which is the period into which these key elements fit?

As historical records have established, it was Shulgi who in the

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284

twenty-eighth year of his reign (2068 b.c.) gave his daughter in
marriage to an Elamite chieftain and granted him the city of Larsa
as a dowry; in return the Elamites put a “foreign legion” of Elam-
ite troops at Shulgi’s disposal. These troops were employed by
Shulgi to subdue the western provinces, including Canaan. It is
thus in the last years of Shulgi’s reign and when Ur was still an im-
perial capital under his immediate successor Amar-Sin that we find
the historical time slot into which all the biblical and Mesopota-
mian records seem to fit perfectly.

It is in that time, we believe, that the search for the historical
Abraham should be conducted; for— as we shall show— the tale of
Abraham was interwoven with the tale of the fall of Ur, and his
days were the last days of Sumer.

With the discrediting of the Amraphel-Hammurabi notion, the
verification of the Age of Abraham became a free-for-all, some
suggesting such late dates that made the first patriarch a descendant
of the later kings of Israel. . . . But the exact dates of his time and
events need no guessing: the information is provided by the Bible
itself; all we have to do is accept its veracity.

The chronological calculations are surprisingly simple. Our
starting point is 963 b.c., the year in which Solomon is believed to
have assumed the kingship in Jerusalem. The Book of Kings states
unequivocally that Solomon began the construction of the Temple
of Yahweh in Jerusalem in the fourth year of his reign, completing
it late in the eleventh year. I Kings 6: 1 also states that “It came to
pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the Children of Is-
rael were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solo-
mon’s reign over Israel . . . that he began to build the House of
Yahweh.” This statement is supported (with a slight difference) by
the priestly tradition that there had been twelve priestly genera-
tions, of forty years each, from the Exodus to the time when
Azariah “executed the priestly office in the temple that Solomon
built in Jerusalem” (I Chronicles 5:36).

Both sources agree on the passage of 480 years, with this differ-
ence: one counts from the start of the temple’s construction (960
b.c.) and the other from its completion (in 953 b.c.), when the
priestly services could begin. This would set the Israelite Exodus
from Egypt in either 1440 or 1433 b.c.; the latter date, we find, of-
fers better synchronization with other events.

Based on the knowledge amassed by the beginning of this cen-
tury, Egyptologists and biblical scholars had by then reached the

Abraham: The Fateful Years

287

conclusion that the Exodus had indeed taken place in the middle of
the fifteenth century b.c. But then the weight of scholarly opinion
shifted to a thirteenth-century date because it seemed to better fit
the archaeological dating of various Canaanite sites, in line with
the biblical record of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites.

Yet such a new dating was not unanimously agreed upon. The
most notorious city conquered was Jericho; and one of its promi-
nent excavators (K. M. Kenyon) concluded that the pertinent de-
struction occurred circa 1560 b.c.— well ahead of the biblical
events. On the other hand, Jericho’s principal excavator, J.
Garstang (The Story of Jericho), held that the archaeological evi-
dence points to its conquest sometime between 1400 and 1385 b.c.
Adding to this the forty years of Israelite wandering in the
wilderness after the departure from Egypt, he and others found ar-
chaeological support for an Exodus date sometime between 1440
and 1425 b.c. — a time frame that agrees with our suggestion of
1433 b.c.

For more than a century scholars have also searched through the
extant Egyptian records for an Egyptian clue to the Exodus and its
date. The only apparent references are found in the writings of
Manetho. As quoted by Josephus in Against Apion, Manetho stated
that “after the blasts of God’s displeasure broke upon Egypt,” a
Pharaoh named Toumosis negotiated with the Shepherd People,
“the people from the east, to evacuate Egypt and go whither they
would, unmolested.” They then left and traversed the wilderness,
“and built a city in a country now called Judaea . . . and gave it
the name Jerusalem.”

Did Josephus adjust the writings of Manetho to suit the biblical
tale, or did, in fact, the events concerning the sojourn, harsh treat-
ment, and eventual Exodus of the Israelites occur in the reign of
one of the well-known Pharaohs named Thothmes?

Manetho referred to “the king who expelled the pastoral people
from Egypt” in a section devoted to the Pharaohs of the eighteenth
dynasty. Egyptologists now accept as historical fact the expulsion
of the Hyksos (the Asiatic “Shepherd Kings”) in 1567 b.c. by the
founder of the eighteenth dynasty, the Pharaoh Ahmosis (Amosis
in Greek). This new dynasty, which established the New Kingdom
in Egypt, might well have been the new dynasty of Pharaohs “who
knew not Joseph” of which the Bible speaks (Exodus 1:8).

Theophilus, second-century Bishop of Antioch, also referred in
his writings to Manetho and stated that the Hebrews were enslaved
by the king Tethmosis, for whom they “built strong cities, Peitho

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and Rameses and On, which is Heliopolis”; then they departed
Egypt under the Pharaoh “whose name was Amasis.”

It thus appears from these ancient sources that the Israelites’
troubles began under a Pharaoh named Thothmes and culminated
with their departure under a successor named Amasis. What are the
historical facts as they have been established by now?

After Ahmosis had expelled the Hyksos, his successors on the
throne of Egypt— several of whom indeed bore the name Thothmes,
as the ancient historians have stated— engaged in military cam-
paigns in Greater Canaan, using the Way of the Sea as their inva-
sion route. Thothmes I (1525-1512 b.c.), a professional soldier,
put Egypt on a war footing and launched military expeditions into
Asia as far as the Euphrates River. It is our belief that it was he who
feared Israelite disloyalty— “when a war shall be called, they shall
join our enemies”— and ordered therefore the killing of all new-
born Israelite male babies (Exodus 1:9-16). By our calculations,
Moses was bom in 1513 b.c., the year before the death of
Thothmes I.

J. W. Jack (The Date of the Exodus) and others, earlier this cen-
tury, had wondered whether “the Pharaoh’s daughter" who had
retrieved the baby Moses from the river and then raised him in the
royal palace could have been Hatshepsut, the eldest daughter of
Thothmes I by his official spouse and thus the only royal princess
of the time granted the high title “The King’s Daughter,” a title
identical to that given in the Bible. We believe that indeed it was
she; and her continued treatment of Moses as an adopted son can
be explained by the fact that after she had married the succeeding
Pharaoh, her half-brother Thothmes II, she could not bear him a
son.

Thothmes II died after a short reign. His successor, Thothmes
III— mothered by a harem girl— was Egypt’s greatest warrior-king,
an ancient Napoleon in the view of some scholars. Of his seventeen
campaigns against foreign lands to obtain tribute and captives for
his major construction works, most were thrust into Canaan and
Lebanon and as far north as the Euphrates River. We believe, as
T. E. Peet (Egypt and the Old Testament) and others held earlier
this century, that it was this Pharaoh, Thothmes III, who was the
enslaver of the Israelites; for in his military expeditions he pushed
northward as far as Naharin, the Egyptian name for the area on the
upper Euphrates called in the Bible Aram-Naharim, where the kin-
folk of the Hebrew Patriarchs had remained; and this could well
explain the Pharaoh's fear (Exodus 1:10) that “when there shall

Abraham: The Fateful Years

289

happen to be a war, they [the Israelites! shall join unto our ene-
mies.” It was, we suggest, Thothmes III from whose death sen-
tence Moses escaped to the wilderness of the Sinai after he had
learned of his Hebrew origins and openly sided with his people.

Thothmes III died in 1450 b.c. and was followed on the throne
by Amenophis II— the Amasis named by Theophilus quoting
Manetho. It was indeed “after a long time, that the king of Egypt
died,” (Exodus 2:23) that Moses dared return to Egypt to demand
of the successor— Amenophis II, in our opinion— to “let my people
go.” The reign of Amenophis II lasted from 1450 to 1425 b.c.; it is
our conclusion that the Exodus had taken place in 1433 b.c., ex-
actly when Moses was eighty years old (Exodus 7:7).

Continuing our calculation backward, we now seek to establish
the date when the Israelites arrived in Egypt. Hebrew traditions as-
sert a stay of 400 years, in accord with the Lord’s statement to
Abraham (Genesis 15:13-14); so also states the New Testament
(Acts 7:6). The Book of Exodus, however, says that “the sojourn-
ing of the Children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was four hundred
and thirty years” (Exodus 12:40-41). The qualifying of “so-
journ” by the words “who dwelt in Egypt” might have been in-
tended to distinguish between the Josephites (who had dwelt in
Egypt) and the newly arrived families of Joseph’s brothers, who
just came “to sojourn.” If so, then the difference of thirty years
can be accounted for by the fact that Joseph was thirty years old
when made Chief of Egypt. This would leave intact the 400 figure
as the years of Israelite (rather than Josephite) sojourn in Egypt,
and place the event in 1833 b.c. (1,433 + 400).

The next clue is found in Genesis 47:8-9: “And,. Joseph brought
in Jacob, his father, and stood him before the Pharaoh. . . . And
the Pharaoh said unto Jacob: ‘How old art thou?’ and Jacob said
unto Pharaoh: ‘The days of my years are one hundred and
thirty.’ ” Jacob, then, was bom in 1963 b.c.

Now, Isaac was sixty years old when Jacob was bom unto him
(Genesis 6:26); and Isaac was bom unto his father Abraham when
Abraham was 100 years old (Genesis 21:5). Accordingly, Abra-
ham (who lived to be 175) was 160 years old when his grandson
Jacob was bom. This places the birth of Abraham in 2123 b.c.

The century of Abraham— the hundred years from his birth to the
birth of his son and successor Isaac — was thus the century that wit-
nessed the rise and fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Our reading of
biblical chronology and tales puts Abraham right in the middle of
the momentous events of that time— not as a mere observer but as

290 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

an active participant. Contrary to the assertions of advocates of
biblical criticism that with the tale of Abraham the Bible loses in-
terest in the general history of mankind and the Near East, to focus
on the ‘‘tribal histoiy" of one particular nation, the Bible in fact
continues to relate (as it did with the tales of the Deluge and the
Tower of Babel) events of major concern to mankind and its civili-
zation: a war of unprecedented aspects and a disaster of a unique
nature; events in which the Hebrew Patriarch played an important
role. It is the tale of how the legacy of Sumer was salvaged when
Sumer itself was doomed.

In spite of numerous studies concerning Abraham, the fact re-
mains that all we really know about him is what we find in the Bi-
ble. Belonging to a family that traced its ancestry to the line of
Shem, Abraham— then called Abram — was the son of Terah, his
brothers being Harran and Nahor. When Harran died at an early
age, the family was living in “Ur of the Chaldees.” There, Abram
married Sarai (later renamed Sarah).

Then “did Terah take Abram his son and Lot his grandson, the
son of Harran, and Sarai his daughter-in-law the wife of Abram his
son; and they left and went forth from Ur of the Chaldees to go to
the land of Canaan; and they went as far as Harran, and dwelt
there.”

Archaeologists have found Harran (“The Caravanry”). Situ-
ated to the northwest of Mesopotamia at the foothills of the Taurus
Mountains, it was a major crossroads in antiquity. As Mari con-
trolled the southern gateway from Mesopotamia to the lands of the
Mediterranean coast, so did Harran control the gateway of the
northern route to the lands of Western Asia. Marking, at the time
of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the limits of Nannar’s domains where
they bordered on Adad’s Asia Minor, Harran was found by the ar-
chaeologists to have been a mirror image of Ur in its layout and in
its worship of Nannar/Sin.

No explanation is given in the Bible for leaving Ur, and there is
also no time stated, but we can guess the answers if we relate the
departure to events in Mesopotamia in general and in Ur in particu-
lar.

We know that Abraham was seventy-five when he proceeded
later on from Harran to Canaan. The tenor of the biblical narrative
suggests a long stay at Harran and depicts Abraham on his arrival
there as a young man with a new bride. If Abraham, as we have
concluded, was bom in 2123 b.c., he was a child often when Ur-

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Nammu ascended the throne in Ur, when Nannar was favored for
the first time with the trusteeship over Nippur. And he was a young
man of twenty-seven when Ur-Nammu inexplicably fell from
Anu’s and Enid's favor, slain on a distant battlefield. We have de-
scribed the traumatic effect of the event on the people of Mesopota-
mia, the shock it had given to their faith in Nannar’s omnipotence
and the fidelity of Enid's word.

The year of Ur-Nammu’s fall was 2096 b.c. Could it not have
been the year when— under the impact of the event or as a conse-
quence thereof— Terah and his family left Ur fora faraway destina-
tion, stopping off at Harran, the Ur away from Ur?

All through the following years of Ur’s decline and Shulgi’s pro-
fanities, the family stayed on in Harran. Then, suddenly, the Lord
acted again:

And Yahweh said unto Abram:

“Get thee out of thy country

and out of thy birthplace

and from thy father’s house,

unto the land which I will show thee’’ . . .

And Abram departed as Yahweh had spoken unto him,
and Lot went with him.

And Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Harran.

Once again, no reason is given for the crucial move. But the
chronological clue is most revealing. When Abraham was seventy-
five years old, the year was 2048 b.c.— the veiy year of Shulgi’s
downfall!

Because Abraham’s family (Genesis 1 1) directly continued the
line of Shem, Abraham has been considered a Semite, one whose
background, cultural heritage, and language were Semitic, as dis-
tinct (in scholars’ minds) from the non-Semitic Sumerians and the
later Indo-Europeans. But in the original biblical sense, all the peo-
ples of greater Mesopotamia were descended of Shem, “Semite”
and “Sumerian” alike. There is nothing in the Bible that sug-
gests— as some scholars have begun to hold— that Abraham and his
family were Amorites (i.e. , western Semites) who had come as im-
migrants to Sumer and then returned to their original abode. On the
contrary: There is everything to support the image of a family
rooted in Sumer from its earliest beginnings, hastily uprooted from
its country and birthplace and told to go to an unfamiliar land.
The correspondence between two biblical events with the dates

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of two major Sumerian events— and of more to come— must serve
as an indication of a direct connection between them all. Abraham
emerges not as the son of immigrant aliens but as the scion of a
family directly involved in Sumerian affairs of state!

In their search for the answer to the question of “Who Was
Abraham,” scholars have seized upon the similarity between his
designation as a Hebrew (Ibri) and the term Hapiru (which in the
Near East could transform to Habiru) by which the Assyrians and
Babylonians in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries b.c. called
bands of pillaging western Semites. At the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury b.c. , the commander of an Egyptian garrison in Jerusalem
asked his king for reinforcements against approaching Hapiru.
Scholars have taken all that as evidence for the notion that Abra-
ham was a western Semite.

Many scholars doubt, however, whether the term denotes an
ethnic group at all, wondering whether the word was not a descrip-
tive noun simply meaning “marauders” or “invaders.” The sug-
gestion that Ibri (clearly from the verb “to cross”) and Hapiru are
one and the same entails substantial philological and etymological
problems. There are also great chronological inconsistencies, all of
which gave rise to serious objections to this suggested solution for
the identity of Abraham, especially when the biblical data is com-
pared with the “bandit” connotation of the term Hapiru. Thus the
Bible relates incidents concerning water wells, which show that
Abraham was careful to avoid conflict with local residents as he
journeyed through Canaan. When Abraham became involved in
the War of the Kings, he refused to share in the booty. This is not
the behavior of a marauding barbarian but rather of a person of high
standards of conduct. Coming to Egypt, Abraham and Sarah were
taken to the Pharaoh’s court; in Canaan, Abraham made treaties
with the local rulers. This is not the image of a nomad pillaging
others’ settlements; it is the image of a personage of high standing
skilled in negotiation and diplomacy.

It was out of such considerations that Alfred Jeremias, then a
leading Assyriologist and professor of the history of religion at the
Leipzig University, announced in the 1930 edition of his master
work Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients that “in his
intellectual makeup Abraham was a Sumerian.” He enlarged on
this conclusion in a 1932 study entitled Der Kosmos von Sumer:
“Abraham was not a Semitic Babylonian but a Sumerian.” Abra-
ham, he suggested, headed the Faithful whose reformation sought
to raise Sumerian society to higher religious levels.

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293

These were audacious ideas in a Germany witnessing the rise of
Nazism with its racial theories. Soon after the assumption of power
by Hitler, the heretic suggestions of Jeremias were strongly put
down by Nikolaus Schneider in a reply entitled War Abraham
Sumerer? Abraham was neither a Sumerian nor a man of pure de-
scent, he concluded: “From the time of the reign of the Akkadian
king Sargon in Ur, the home-place of Abraham, there was never
there a pure, unmixed Sumerian population and a homogenous Su-
merian culture.”

The ensuing upheavals and World War II cut off further debate
on the subject. Regrettably, the thread discerned by Jeremias has
not been picked up. Yet all the biblical and Mesopotamian evi-
dence tells us that Abraham was indeed a Sumerian.

The Old Testament, in fact (Genesis 17:1-16), provides us with
the time and manner in which Abraham was transformed from a
Sumerian nobleman to a west Semitic potentate, under a covenant
between him and his God. Amid a ritual of circumcision, his Su-
merian name AB.RAM (“Father’s Beloved”) was changed to the
Akkadian/Semitic Abraham (“Father of a Multitude of Nations”)
and that of his wife SARAI (“Princess”) was adapted to the Se-
mitic Sarah.

It was only when he was ninety-nine years old that Abraham be-
came a “Semite.”

As we decipher the age-old enigma of Abraham’s identity and
his Mission to Canaan, it is in Sumerian histoiy, customs, and lan-
guage that we shall search for the answers.

Is it not naive to assume that for the Mission to Canaan, for the
birth of a nation, and for kingship over all the lands from the border
of Egypt to the border of Mesopotamia, the Lord would choose
someone at random, picking up anyone in the streets of Ur? The
young woman whom Abraham married bore the epithet-name Prin-
cess; since she was a half-sister of Abraham (“Indeed she is my
sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my
mother”), we can take it for granted that either Abraham’s father
or Sarah’s mother was of royal descent. Since the daughter of
Harran, Abraham’s brother, also bore a royal name ( Milkha —
“Queenly”), it follows that it was through the father of Abraham
that the royal ancestry flowed. In dealing with Abraham’s family
we thus deal with a family of Sumer’s highest echelons; people of a
noble deportment and elegant dress as found depicted on various
Sumerian statues (Fig. 98).

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 98

It was a family that not only could claim descent from Shem but
which kept family records tracing its lineage through generations
of firstborn sons: Arpakhshad and Shelach and Eber; Peleg, Re'u,
and Serug; Nahor and Terah and Abraham; taking the family’s re-
corded history back for no less than three centuries!

What do the epithet-names signify? If Shelach (“Sword”) was
bom, as chapter 1 1 of Genesis states, 258 years before Abraham,
he was bom in 2381 b.c. That indeed was the time of the strife that
brought Sargon to the throne in the new capital Agade (“United”),
symbolizing the unification of the lands and a new era. Sixty-four
years later the family named its firstborn descendant Peleg (“Divi-
sion”), “for in his days the land divided.” It was the time, in fact,
when Sumer and Akkad were tom apart after Sargon’s attempt to
remove the sacred soil from Babylon and his consequent death.

But of greatest interest, to this very day, has been the meaning of
the name Eber and the reason for bestowing it upon the firstborn in
2351 b.c. and from which has stemmed the biblical term Ibri
(“Hebrew”) by which Abraham and his family identified them-
selves. It clearly stems from the root word meaning “to cross,”

Abraham: The Fateful Years

295

and the best scholars had to offer in explanation was to seek the
Habiru/Hapiru connection, which we have already mentioned (and
discarded). This erroneous interpretation has stemmed from the
search for the meaning of the epithet-name in Western Asia. It is
our conviction that instead the answer is to be found in the Sume-
rian origins and the Sumerian language of Abraham and his ances-
tors. Such a look at the Sumerian roots of the family and the name
provides an answer that startles with its simplicity.

The term Ibri (“Hebrew”) by which Abraham and his family
identified themselves clearly stemmed from Eber, the father of
Peleg, and from the root “to cross.” Instead of seeking the mean-
ing of the epithet-name in the Hapiru notions or in Western Asia, it
is our conviction that the answer is to be found in the Sumerian ori-
gins and the Sumerian language of Abraham and his ancestors.
Then, a new solution emerges with startling simplicity:

The biblical suffix “i,” when applied to a person, meant “a na-
tive of”; Gileadi meant a native of Gilead and so on. Likewise,
Ibri meant a native of the place called “Crossing”; and that, pre-
cisely, was the Sumerian name for Nippur: NI.IB.RU — the Cross-
ing Place, the place where the pre-Diluvial grids crisscrossed each
other, the original Navel of the Earth, the olden Mission Control
Center.

The dropping of the n in transposing from Sumerian to Akka-
dian/Hebrew was a frequent occurrence. In stating that Abraham
was an Ibri, the Bible simply meant that Abraham was a Ni-ib-ri, a
man of Nippurian origin!

The fact that Abraham’s family migrated to Harran from Ur has
been taken by scholars to imply that Ur was also Abraham’s birth-
place; but that is not stated anywhere in the Bible. On the contrary,
the command to Abraham to go to Canaan and leave for good his
past abodes lists three separate entities; his father’s house (which
was then in Harran); his land (the city-state of Ur); and his birth-
place (which the Bible does not identify). Our suggestion that Ibri
means a native of Nippur solves the problem of Abraham’s true
birthplace.

As the name Eber indicates, it was in his time— the middle of the
twenty-fourth century b.c.— that the family’s association with
Nippur had begun. Nippur was never a royal capital; rather, it was
a consecrated city, Sumer’s “religious center,” as scholars put it.
It was also the place where the knowledge of astronomy was en-
trusted to the high priests and thus the place where the calendar —

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296

the relationship between the Sun, Earth, and Moon in their
orbits — was originated.

Scholars have recognized that our present-day calendars derive
from the original Nippurian calendar. All the evidence shows that
the Nippurian calendar began circa 4000 b.c. , in the age of Taurus.
In this we find yet another confirmation of the umbilical cord con-
necting the Hebrews with Nippur: The Jewish calendar still contin-
ues to count the years from an enigmatic beginning in 3760 b.c. (so
that in 1983 the Jewish year was 5743). It has been assumed that
this is a count “from the beginning of the world”; but the actual
statement by Jewish sages was that this is the number of years that
had passed “since counting [of years] began.” We suggest that it
means, since the introduction of the calendar in Nippur.

In the ancestral family of Abraham we thus find a priestly family
of royal blood, a family headed by a Nippurian high priest who was
the only one allowed into the temple’s innermost chamber, there to
receive the deity’s word and convey it to king and people.

In this regard the name of Abraham’s father, Terah, is of great
interest. Seeking clues only in the Semitic environment, biblical
scholars regard the name, as those of Hamm and Nahor, as mere
toponyms (names that personify places), holding that there were
cities by such names in central and northern Mesopotamia. Assyri-
ologists searching the Akkadian terminology (being the first Se-
mitic language) could only find that Tirhu meant “an artifact or
vessel for magical purposes.” But if we turn to the Sumerian
language, we find that the cuneiform sign for Tirhu stemmed
directly from that of an object called in Sumerian DUG.NAMTAR
—literally, a “Fate Speaker”— a Pronouncer of Oracles!

Terah, then, was an Oracle Priest, one assigned to approaching
the “Stone that Whispers” to hear the deity’s words and communi-
cate them (with or without an interpretation) to the lay hierarchy. It
was a function assumed in later times by the Israelite High Priest,
who alone was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, approach the
Dvir (“Speaker”), and “hear the voice [of the Lord] speak unto
him from off the overlay which is upon the Ark of the Covenant,
from between the two Cherubim.” During the Israelite Exodus, at
Mount Sinai the Lord proclaimed that his covenant with the de-
scendants of Abraham meant that “ye shall be unto me a kingdom
of priests.” It was a statement that reflected the status of Abra-
ham’s own descent: a royal priesthood.

Farfetched as these conclusions may sound, they are in full ac-
cord with the Sumerian practices whereby kings appointed their

Abraham: The Fateful Years

297

daughters and sons, and often themselves, to high-priestly posi-
tions, resulting in the commingling of the royal and priestly lin-
eages. Votive inscriptions found at Nippur (as those by the
archaeological expeditions of the University of Pennsylvania) con-
firm that the kings of Ur cherished the title “Pious Shepherd of
Nippur” and performed there priestly functions; and the governor
of Nippur (PA.TE.SI NI.IB.RU) was also the Foremost UR.ENLIL
(“Enlil’s Foremost Servant”).

Some of the names borne by these royal-priestly VIPs resembled
Abraham’s Sumerian name (AB.RAM), also beginning with the
component AB (“Father” or “Progenitor”); such, for example,
was the name AB.BA.MU of a governor of Nippur during Shulgi’s
reign.

That a family of people so closely associated with Nippur that
they were called “Nippurians” (i.e. , “Hebrews”) were neverthe-
less holding high positions in Ur is a suggestion that is in complete
accord with the actual circumstances prevailing in Sumer at the
time indicated by us; for it was then, at the time of the Ur III Dy-
nasty, that for the first time in divine affairs and Sumerian history
Nannar and the king of Ur were granted trusteeship over Nippur,
combining the religious and secular functions. It thus could have
well been that when Ur-Nammu assumed the throne in Ur, Terah
moved with his family from Nippur to Ur, perhaps to serve as a li-
aison between the temple in Nippur and the royal palace in Ur.
Their stay in Ur lasted throughout Ur-Nammu’s reign; it was in the
year of his death, as we have shown, that the family left Ur for
Harran.

What the family did at Harran is nowhere stated, but considering
the royal lineage and priestly standing, it must have belonged to the
hierarchy of Harran. The ease with which Abraham dealt, later on,
with various kings suggests that he was involved in Harran’s for-
eign affairs; his special friendship with the Hittite residents of Ca-
naan, who were known for their military experience, may shed a
light on the question of where Abraham himself had acquired the
military proficiency which he employed so successfully during the
War of the Kings.

Ancient traditions also depict Abraham as greatly versed in
astronomy— a knowledge then valuable for long journeys guided
by the stars. According to Josephus, Berossus referred to Abra-
ham, without naming him, when he wrote of the rise “among the
Chaldeans, of a certain righteous and great man who was well seen

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in astronomy.” (If Berossus, the Babylonian historian, had indeed
referred to Abraham, the significance of the inclusion of the He-
brew Patriarch in Babylonian chronicles far exceeds the mere
notation of his knowledge of astronomy.)

All during the ignominious years of Shulgi’s reign, the family of
Terah stayed at Harran. Then, on Shulgi’s demise, the divine order
came to proceed to Canaan. Terah was already quite old, and
Nahor, his son, was to stay on with him in Harran. The one chosen
for the mission was Abraham— himself a mature man of seventy-
five. The year was 2048 b.c.; it marked the beginning of twenty-
four fateful years— eighteen years encompassing the war-filled
reigns of the two immediate successors of Shulgi (Amar-Sin and
Shu-Sin) and six years of Ibbi-Sin, the last sovereign king of Ur.

It is undoubtedly more than mere coincidence that Shulgi’s death
was the signal not only for a move by Abraham, but also for a
realignment among the Near Eastern gods. It was exactly when
Abraham, accompanied (as we learn later) by an elite military
corps, left Harran— the gateway to the Hittite lands— that the exiled
and wandering Marduk appeared in “Hatti land.” Moreover, the
remarkable coincidence is that Marduk stayed there through the
same twenty-four Fateful Years, the years that culminated with the
great Disaster.

The evidence for Marduk’s movements is a tablet (Fig. 99)
found in the library of Ashurbanipal, in which an aging Marduk
tells of his erstwhile wanderings and eventual return to Babylon:

0 great gods, learn my secrets.

As I girdle my belt, my memories remember:

1 am the divine Marduk, a great god.

I was cast off for my sins,

to the mountains I have gone.

In many lands 1 have been a wanderer:

From where the sun rises to where it sets I went.

To the heights of Hatti-land I went.

In Hatti-land I asked an oracle

[about] my throne and my Lordship;

In its midst [I asked]: “Until when?”

24 years, in its midst, I nested.

The appearance of Marduk in Asia Minor — implying an unex-
pected alliance with Adad— was thus the other side of the coin of
Abraham’s rush to Canaan. We learn from the balance of the text

Fig. 99

that Marduk sent from his new place of exile emissaries and sup-
plies (via Harran) to his followers in Babylon, and trading agents
into Mari, thereby making inroads into both gateways — the one be-
holden to Nannar/Sin and the other to Inanna/Ishtar.

As on a signal, with the death of Shulgi, the whole ancient world
came astir. The House of Nannar had been discredited, and the
House of Marduk saw its final prevailing hour approaching. While
Marduk himself was still excluded from Mesopotamia, his first-
born son, Nabu, was making converts to his father’s cause. His
base of operations was his own “cult center,’’ Borsippa; but his ef-
forts encompassed all the lands, including Greater Canaan.

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It was against this background of fast developments that Abra-
ham was ordered to go to Canaan. Though silent concerning
Abraham’s mission, the Old Testament is clear regarding his desti-
nation: Moving expeditiously to Canaan, Abraham and his wife,
his nephew Lot, and their entourage continued swiftly southward.
There was a stopover at Shechem, where the Lord spoke to Abra-
ham. “Then he removed from there to the Mount, and encamped
east of Beth-El; and he built there an altar to Yahweh and called
the name of Yahweh.” Beth-El, whose name meant “God’s
House”— a site to which Abraham kept coming back— was in the
vicinity of Jerusalem and its hallowed Mount, Mount Moriah
(“Mount of Directing”), upon whose Sacred Rock the Ark of the
Covenant was placed when Solomon built the Temple of Yahweh
in Jerusalem.

From there “Abram journeyed farther, still going toward the
Negev.” The Negev— the dry region where Canaan and the Sinai
peninsula merge — was clearly Abraham’s destination. Several di-
vine pronouncements designated the Brook of Egypt (nowadays
called Wadi El-Arish) as the southern boundary of Abraham’s do-
main, and the oasis of Kadesh-Bamea as his southernmost outpost
(see map). What was Abraham to do in the Negev, whose very
name (“The Dryness”) bespoke its aridity? What was there that
required the patriarch’s hurried, long journey from Harran and
impelled his presence among the miles upon miles of barren land?

The significance of Mount Moriah— Abraham’s first focus of
interest— was that in those days it served, together with its sister
mounts Mount Zophim (“Mount of Observers”) and Mount Zion
(“Mount of Signal”), as the site of Mission Control Center of the
Anunnaki. The significance of the Negev, its only significance,
was that it was the gateway to the Spaceport in the Sinai.

Subsequent narrative informs us that Abraham had military al-
lies in the region and that his entourage included an elite corps of
several hundred fighting men. The biblical term for them — Naar —
has been variously translated as “retainer” or simply “young
man”; but studies have shown that in Hurrian the word denoted
riders or cavalrymen. In fact, recent studies of Mesopotamian texts
dealing with military movements list among the men of the chariots
and the cavalry LU.NAR (“Nar-men”) who served as fast riders.
We find an identical term in the Bible (I Samuel 30:17): after King
David attacked an Amalekite camp, the only ones to escape
were “fourhundred Ish-Naar ’ ’—literally, ‘War-men” or LU.NAR—
“who were riding the camels.”

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301

In describing Abraham’s fighting men as Naar men, the Old
Testament thus informs us that he had with him a corps of cavalry-
men, in all probability camel riders rather than horsemen. He may
have picked up the idea of such a fast-riding fighting force from the
Hittites on whose boundary Harran was located, but for the arid
areas of the Negev and the Sinai, camels rather than horses were
better suited.

The emerging image of Abraham not as a sheepherding nomad
but as an innovative military commander of royal descent may not
fit the customary image of this Hebrew patriarch, but it is in accord
with ancient recollections of Abraham. Thus, quoting earlier
sources concerning Abraham, Josephus (first century a.d.) wrote
of him: “Abraham reigned at Damascus, where he was a for-
eigner, having come with an army out of the land above Babylon’’
from which, “after a long time, the Lord got him up and removed
from that country together with his men and he went to the land
then called the land of Canaan but now the land of Judaea.”

The mission of Abraham was a military one: to protect the space
facilities of the Anunnaki— the Mission Control Center and the
Spaceport!

After a short stay in the Negev Abraham traversed the Sinai pen-
insula and came to Egypt. Evidently no ordinary nomads, Abra-
ham and Sarah were at once taken to the royal palace. By our
reckoning the time was circa 2047 b.c., when the Pharaohs then
ruling in Lower (northern) Egypt— who were not followers of
Amen (“The Hiding God” Ra/Marduk)— were facing a strong
challenge from the princes of Thebes in the south, where Amen
was deemed supreme. We can only guess what matters of state-
alliances, joint defenses, divine commands— were discussed be-
tween the beleaguered Pharaoh and the Ibri, the Nippurian general.
The Bible is silent on this as well as on the length of stay. (The
Book of Jubilees states that the sojourn lasted five years). When the
time came for Abraham to return to the Negev, he was accompa-
nied by a large retinue of the Pharaoh’s men.

“And Abraham went from Egypt, he and his wife and Lot with
him, up onto the Negev.” He was “heavy with flocks” of sheep
and cattle for food and clothing, as well as with asses and camels
for his fast riders. Again he went to Beth-El to “call the name of
Yahweh,” seeking instructions. A separation from Lot followed,
the nephew choosing to reside with his own flocks in the Plain of
the Jordan, “which was watered as the Garden of the Lord, before
Yahweh destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.” Abraham went on to

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the hill country, settling on the highest peak near Hebron, from
where he could see in all directions; and the Lord said unto him:
“Go, cross the country in the length and the breadth of it, for unto
thee shall I give it.”

It was soon thereafter, “in the days of Amraphel king of
Shin’ar,” that the military expedition of the eastern alliance had
taken place.

“Twelve years they [the Canaanite kings] served Khedorla’o-
mer; in the thirteenth year they rebelled; and in the fourteenth year
there came Khedorla’omer and the kings that were with him”
(Genesis 14:4-5).

Scholars have long searched the archaeological records for the
events described in the Bible; their efforts have been unsuccessful
because they searched for Abraham in the wrong era. But if we are
right in our chronology, a simple solution to the “Amraphel”
problem becomes possible. It is a new solution, yet one that rests
on scholarly suggestions made (and ignored) almost a century ago.

Back in 1875, comparing the traditional reading of the name
with its spelling in early biblical translations, F. Lenormant (La
Langue Primitive de la Chaldee) had suggested that the correct
reading should be “Amar-pal, ” as written out phonetically in the
Septuagint (the third century b.c. translation of the Old Testament
into Greek from the original Hebrew). Two years later D. H.
Haigh, writing in the Zeitschrifi fur Agyptische Sprache und
Altertumskunde, also adopted the reading “Amarpal" and, stating
that “the second element [of the king’s name] is a name of the
Moon-god [Sin],” declared: “I have long been convinced of the
identity of Amar-pal as one of the kings of Ur.”

In 1916, Franz M. Bohl (Die Konige von Genesis 14) suggested
again — without success — that the name be read, as in the Septuagint,
“Amar-pal,” explaining that it meant “Seen by the Son”— a royal
name in line with other royal names in the Near East, such as the
Egyptian Thoth-mes (“Seen by Thoth”). (For some reason Bohl and
others have neglected to mention the no-less-significant fact that the
Septuagint spelled out the name of Khedorla'omer Khodologomar —
almost identical to the Kudur-lagamar of the Spartoli tablets.)

Pal (meaning “son”) was indeed a common suffix in Mesopota-
mian royal names, standing for the deity considered the favorite
Divine Son. Since in Ur the god deemed to have been the Favored
Son was Nannar/Sin, we suggest that Amar-Sin and Amar-pal
were, in Ur, one and the same name.

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303

Our identification of “Amarphal” of Genesis 14 as Amar-Sin,
third king of Ur’s Third Dynasty, meshes perfectly the biblical and
the Sumerian chronologies. The biblical tale of the War of the
Kings places the event soon after Abraham’s return to the Negev
from Egypt but before the tenth anniversary of his arrival in Ca-
naan; i.e., between 2042 and 2039 b.c. The reign of Amar-
Sin/Amar-Pal lasted from 2047 to 2039 b.c.; accordingly, the war
had taken place in the latter part of his reign.

The year formulas for Amar-Sin’s reign pinpoint his seventh
year — 2041 b.c. — as the year of the major military expedition to
the western provinces. The biblical data (Genesis 14:4-5) asserts
that this took place in the fourteenth year after the Elamites under
Khedorla’omer had subjugated the Canaanite kings; and the year
2041 was indeed fourteen years after Shulgi, having received
Nannar’s oracles, had launched in 2055 b.c. the military expedi-
tion led by Elamites into Canaan.

Our synchronization of biblical and Sumerian events and dates
unfolds the following sequence and upholds every time factor re-
ported in the Bible:

2123 b.c.
2113 b.c.

2095 b.c.
2055 b.c.
2048 b.c.

2047 b.c.
2042 b.c.
2041 b.c.

• Abraham bom in Nippur to his father Terah.

• Ur-Nammu enthroned in Ur, given guardianship of
Nippur.

Terah and his family move to Ur.

• Shulgi ascends throne after death of Ur-Nammu.
Terah and his family leave Ur for Harran.

• Shulgi receives Nannar’s oracles, sends Elamite
troops to Canaan.

• Shulgi’s death ordered by Anu and Enlil.

Abraham, seventy-five years old, ordered to leave
Harran for Canaan.

• Amar-Sin (“Amarpal”) ascends the throne of Ur.
Abraham leaves the Negev for Egypt.

• Canaanite kings switch allegiance to “other gods.”
Abraham returns from Egypt with elite corps.

• Amar-Sin launches the War of the Kings.

Who were the “other gods” that were winning the allegiance of
Canaanite cities? They were Marduk, scheming from nearby exile,
and his son, Nabu, who was roaming eastern Canaan, gaining su-
premacy and adherents. As biblical place names indicate, the

whole land of Moab had come under Nabu’s influence: the land
was also known as the Land of Nabu and many sites there were
named in his honor; the highest peak retained its name— Mount
Nebo — through the millennia that followed.

This is the historical frame into which the Old Testament has
fitted the invasion from the east. But even seen from the biblical

Abraham: The Fateful Years

305

viewpoint, which compressed the Mesopotamian tales of the gods
into a monotheistic mold, it was an unusual war: the ostensible
purpose — the suppression of a rebellion — turns out to have been a
secondary aspect of the war; the real target— a crossroads oasis in a
wilderness— was never reached.

Taking the southern route from Mesopotamia to Canaan, the in-
vaders proceeded southward in Transjordan, along the King’s
Highway, attacking in succession key outposts guarding crossing
points on the Jordan River: Ashterot-Kamayim in the north; Ham
in the center; and Shaveh-Kiryatayim in the south.

According to the biblical tale, a place called El-Paran was the
real target of the invaders, but it was never reached by them. Com-
ing down Transjordan and circling the Dead Sea, the invaders
passed by Mount Se’irand advanced “toward El-Paran, which is
upon the Wilderness.” But they were forced to “swing back
by Ein-Mishpat, which is Kadesh.” El-Paran (“God's Gloried
Place”?) was never reached; somehow the invaders were beaten
back at Ein-Mishpat, also known as Kadesh or Kadesh-Bamea.

It was only then, as they turned back toward Canaan, that
“Thereupon the king of Sodom and the king of Gomorrah and the
king of Admah and the king of Zebi’im and the king of Bela, which
is Zoar, marched forth and engaged them in battle in the Vale of
Siddim.” (See map.)

The battle with these Canaanite kings was thus a late phase of
the war and not its first purpose. Almost a century ago, in a thor-
ough study titled Kadesh-Barnea, H. C. Trumbull had concluded
that the true target of the invaders was El-Paran, which he correctly
identified as the fortified oasis of Nakhl in Sinai’s central plain.
But neither he nor others could explain why a great alliance
would launch an army to a destination a thousand miles away and
fight gods and men to reach an isolated oasis in a great, desolate
plain.

But why had they gone there, and who was it that blocked their
way at Kadesh-Bamea, forcing the invaders to turn back?

There have been no answers; and no answers can make sense ex-
cept the ones offered by us: The only significance of the destina-
tion was its Spaceport, and the one who blocked the advance at
Kadesh-Bamea was Abraham. From earlier times Kadesh-Bamea
was the closest place where men could approach in the region of
the Spaceport without special permission. Shulgi had gone there to
pray and make offerings to the God Who Judges, and nearly a thou-
sand years before him the Sumerian king Gilgamesh stopped there

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306

to obtain the special permission. It was the place the Sumerians
called BAD.GAL.DINGIR and Sargon of Akkad Dur-Mah-Ilani,
clearly listing it in his inscriptions as a place in Tilmun (the Sinai
peninsula).

It was the place, we suggest, which the Bible called Kadesh-
Bamea; and there Abraham stood with his elite troops, blocking
the invaders’ advance to the Spaceport proper.

The hints in the Old Testament become a detailed tale in the
Khedorlaomer Texts, which make clear that the war was intended
to prevent the return of Marduk and thwart the efforts of Nabu to
gain access to the Spaceport. These texts not only name the very
same kings who are mentioned in the Bible but even repeat the bib-
lical detail of the switch of allegiance “in the thirteenth year”!

As we return to the Khedorlaomer Texts to obtain the details for
the biblical frame, we should bear in mind that they were written
by a Babylonian historian who favored Marduk’s desire to make
Babylon “the heavenward navel in the four regions.” It was to
thwart this that the gods opposing Marduk ordered Khedorla’omer
to seize and defile Babylon:

The gods . . .

to Kudur-Laghamar, king of the land Elam,
they decreed: “Descend there!”

That which to the city, was bad he performed;

In Babylon, the precious city of Marduk,
sovereignty he seized;

In Babylon, the city of the king of the gods, Marduk,
kingship he overthrew;

To herds of dogs its temple he made a den;

Flying ravens, loud shrieking, their dung dropped there.

The despoiling of Babylon was only the beginning. After the
“bad deeds” were done there, Utu/Shamash sought action against
Nabu, who (he said in accusation) had subverted the allegiance of a
certain king to his father, Nannar/Sin. It happened, the Khedorla
omer Text states, in the thirteenth year (just as Genesis 14 states):

Before the gods the son of his father [came];

On that day Shamash, the Bright One,
against the lord of lords, Marduk [he said]:

“The faithfulness of his heart [the king] betrayed—
in the time of the thirteenth year

Abraham: The Fateful Years

307

a falling-out against my father [he had];

to his faith-keeping the king ceased to attend;

all this Nabu has caused to happen.”

The assembled gods, thus alerted to the role of Nabu in the
spreading rebellions, put together a coalition of loyal kings and ap-
pointed the Elamite Kudur-Laghamar as its military commander.
Their first order was that ‘‘Borsippa, the stronghold [of Nabu],
with weapons be despoiled.” Carrying out the order, “Kudur-
Laghamar, with wicked thoughts against Marduk, the shrine of
Borsippa with fire he destroyed and its sons with a sword he slew. ”
Then, the militaiy expedition against the rebellious kings was or-
dered. The Babylonian text lists the targets to be attacked and the
names of their attackers; we easily recognize the biblical names
among them: Eriaku (Ariokh) was to attack Shebu (Beer-Sheba)
and Tud-Ghula (Tidhal) was to “smite with a sword the sons of
Gaza.”

Acting in accordance with an oracle of Ishtar, the army put
together by the Kings of the East arrived in Transjordan. First
to be attacked was a stronghold in “the high land,” then
Rabattum. The route was the same as the one described in the
Bible: from the highland in the north through the district of
Rabat-Amon in the center, southward around the Dead Sea.
Thereafter, Dur-Mah-Ilani was to be captured, and the Ca-
naanite cities (including Gaza and Beer-Sheba in the Negev)
were to be punished. But at Dur-Mah-Ilani, according to the
Babylonian text, “the son of the priest, whom the gods in their
true counsel had anointed,” stood in the invaders’ way and
“the despoiling prevented.”

Could the Babylonian text indeed refer to Abraham, the son of
Terah the priest, and spell out his role in turning back the invaders?
The possibility is strengthened by the fact that the Mesopotamian
and biblical texts relate the same event in the same locality with the
same outcome.

But there is more to it than just a possibility, for we have come
upon one highly intriguing clue.

This is the unnoticed fact that the date formulas for the reign of
Amar-Sin call his seventh year— the crucial year 2041 b.c., the
year of the military expedition— also MU NE IB.RU.UM BA.HUL
(Fig. 100), “Year [in which] the Shephending-abode of IB.RU.UM
was attacked.”

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

fjnr

Fig. 100

Can this reference, in the exact crucial year, be other than to
Abraham and his shepherding abode?

There is also a possible pictorial commemoration of the inva-
sion. This is a scene carved on a Sumerian cylinder seal (Fig. 101).
It has been regarded as depicting the journey of Etana, an early
king of Kish, to the Winged Gateway, where an “Eagle” took him
aloft so high that the Earth disappeared from view. But the seal de-
picts the crowned hero on horseback— too early for Etana’s time—
and standing between the site of the Winged Gateway and two
distinct groups. One of four armed Mighty Men whose leader is
also on horseback moves toward a cultivated area in the Sinai pen-
insula (indicated by the symbol of Sin's crescent with wheat grow-
ing in it). The other is of five kings, facing in the opposite
direction. The depiction thus has all the elements of an ancient il-
lustration of the War of the Kings and the role of the “Priest’s
Son” in it, rather than that of Etana’s journey to the Spaceport. The
hero, depicted in the center atop an animal, could thus be Abraham
rather than Etana.

Fig. 101

Having carried out his mission to protect the Spaceport, Abra-
ham returned to his base near Hebron. Encouraged by his feat, the
Canaanite kings marched their forces to intercept the retreating

Abraham: The Fateful Years

309

army from the East. But the invaders beat them and “seized all the
possessions of Sodom and Gomorrah” as well as one prize hos-
tage: “They took with them Lot, the nephew of Abraham, who
was residing at Sodom.”

On hearing the news, Abraham called up his best cavalrymen
and pursued the retreating invaders. Catching up with them near
Damascus, he succeeded in releasing Lot and retrieving all the
booty. Upon his return he was greeted as a victor in the Valley of
Shalem (Jerusalem):

And Malkizedek, the king of Shalem,

brought forth bread and wine,

for he was a priest unto the God Most High.

And he blessed him, saying:

“Blessed be Abram unto the God Most High,

Possessor of Heaven and Earth;

And blessed be the God Most High

who hath delivered thine foes into thine hand.”

Soon the Canaanite kings also arrived to thank Abraham, and of-
fered him all the seized possessions as a reward. But Abraham,
saying that his local allies could share in that, refused to take “even
a shoe lace” for himself or his warriors. He had acted neither out of
friendship for the Canaanite kings norout of enmity for the Eastern
Alliance; in the war between the House of Nannar and the House of
Marduk, he was neutral. It was for “Yahweh, the God Most High,
Possessor of Heaven and Earth, that I have raised my hands,” he
stated.

The failed invasion did not arrest the rush of momentous events
in the ancient world. A year later, in 2040 b.c., Mentuhotep II,
leader of the Theban princes, defeated the northern Pharaohs and
extended the rule of Thebes (and of its god) up to the western ap-
proaches to the Sinai peninsula. In the following year Amar-Sin at-
tempted to reach the Sinai peninsula by sea, only to find his death
by a poisonous bite.

The attacks on the Spaceport were thwarted, but the danger to it
was not removed; and the efforts of Marduk to gain the supremacy
intensified ever more. Fifteen years later Sodom and Gomorrah
went up in flames when Ninurta and Nergal unleashed the Dooms-
day Weapons.

14

THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST

Doomsday came in the twenty-fourth year when Abraham, en-
camped near Hebron, was ninety-nine years old.

“And the Lord appeared unto him in the terebrinth grove of
Mamre as he was sitting at the entrance of the tent, in the heat of
the day. And he lifted his eyes and looked, and behold— three men
were stationed upon him; and as he saw them he ran from the en-
trance of the tent towards them, and bowed to the ground."

Swiftly, from a typicai Middle Eastern scene of a potentate rest-
ing in the shade of his tent, the biblical narrator of Genesis 18
raised Abraham’s eyes and thrust him— and the reader, too— into a
sudden encounter with divine beings. Though Abraham was
gazing out, he did not see the three approaching: they were sud-
denly “stationed upon him." And though they were “men,” he at
once recognized their true identity and bowed to them, calling
them “my lords” and asking them not to “pass over above thy ser-
vant” until he had a chance to prepare for them a sumptuous meal.

It was dusk when the divine visitors finished eating and resting.
Asking about Sarah, their leader said to Abraham: “Return I shall
unto thee at this time next year; by then Sarah thy wife will have a
son.”

The promise of a Rightful Heir to Abraham and Sarah at their
old age was not the sole reason for dropping down on Abraham.
There was a more ominous purpose:

And the men rose up from there

to survey over upon Sodom.

And Abraham had gone with them to see them off,

and the Lord said:

“Can I conceal from Abraham that which I am about to do?”

Recalling Abraham’s past services and promised future, the
Lord then disclosed to him the true purpose of the divine journey:
to verify accusations against Sodom and Gomorrah. “The outcry
regarding Sodom and Gomorrah being great, and the accusation

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against them being grievous,” the Lord said he had decided to
‘‘come down and verify; if it is as the outcry reaching me, they will
destroy completely; and if not, I wish to know.”

The ensuing destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah has become
one of the most frequently depicted and preached-about biblical
episodes. The orthodox and the Fundamentalists never doubted
that the Lord God had literally poured fire and brimstone from the
skies to wipe the sinful cities off the face of the earth. The scholarly
and sophisticated have as tenaciously sought to find ‘‘natural” ex-
planations for the biblical story: an earthquake; a volcanic erup-
tion; some other natural phenomenon which (they grant) might
have been interpreted as an act of God, a punishment befitting the
sin.

But so far as the biblical narrative is concerned— and until now it
has been the only source for all the interpretations— the event was
most definitely not a natural calamity. It is described as a premedi-
tated event: the Lord discloses to Abraham ahead of time what is
about to happen and why. It is an avoidable event, not a calamity
caused by irreversible natural forces: The calamity shall come to
pass only if the “outcry” against Sodom and Gomorrah will be
confirmed. And thirdly (as we shall soon discover) it was also a
postponable event, one whose occurrence could be made to happen
earlier or later, at will.

Realizing the avoidability of the calamity, Abraham embarked
upon a tactic of argumentative attrition: “Perhaps there be fifty
Righteous Ones inside the city,” he said. “Wilt thou destroy and
not spare the place for the sake of the fifty Righteous Ones within
it?” Then he quickly added: “Far be it from you to do such a
thing, to slay the righteous with the guilty! Far be it from you, the
Judge of All the Earth, not to do justice!”

A mortal preaching to his Deity! And the plea is for calling off
the destruction — the premeditated and avoidable destruction — if
there be fifty Righteous Ones in the city. But no sooner had the
Lord agreed to spare the city if there be found such fifty persons
than Abraham, who might have chosen the number fifty knowing
that it would strike a special chord, wondered out loud if the Lord
shall destroy if the number were five short. When the Lord agreed
to call off the destruction if only forty-five be found Righteous,
Abraham continued to bargain the number down to forty, then
thirty, then twenty, then ten. “And the Lord said: ‘I shall not de-
stroy if there be ten’; and he departed as he finished speaking to
Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.”

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

At evetime, the two companions of the Lord — the biblical narra-
tive now refers to them as Mal'akhim (translated “angels” but
meaning “emissaries”)— arrived at Sodom, their task being to ver-
ify the accusations against the city and report their findings back to
the Lord. Lot — who was sitting at the city’s gate — recognized at once
(as Abraham had done earlier) the divine nature of the two visitors,
their identity evidently being given away by their attire or weapons, or
perhaps by the manner (flying over?) in which they arrived.

Now it was Lot’s turn to insist on hospitality, and the two ac-
cepted his invitation to spend the night at his home; but it was not
to be a restful night, for the news of their arrival had stirred up the
whole city.

“They had hardly lain down when the people of the city, the
people of Sodom, surrounded the house— young and old, the whole
population, from eveiy quarter; and they called unto Lot and said
unto him: ‘Where are the men who came unto you tonight? Bring
them out to us, that we may know them.’ ” When Lot failed to do
so, the crowd surged to break their way in; but the two Mal’akhim
“smote the people who were at the house’s entrance with blind-
ness, both young and old; and they wearied themselves trying to
find the doorway.”

Realizing that of all the townspeople only Lot was “righteous,”
the two emissaries needed no further investigation; the fate of the
city was sealed. “And they said unto Lot: ‘Who else hast thou here
besides thee — a son-in-law, thy sons and daughters, any other
relative — all who are in this city — bring them out from this place,
for we are about to destroy it. ’ Rushing to convey the news to his
sons-in-law, Lot only met disbelief and laughter. So at dawn the
emissaries urged Lot to escape without delay, taking with him only
his wife and their two unmarried daughters who lived with them at
home.

But Lot tarried;

so the men took hold of his hand

and his wife’s hand and his two daughters’ hands

—for Yahweh’s mercy was upon him—

and they brought them out,

and put them down outside the city.

Having literally carried the foursome aloft, then put them down
outside the city, the emissaries urged Lot to flee to the mountains:
“Escape for thy life, look not behind thee, neither stop thou any-

_

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where in the plain,” they instructed him; “unto the mountains es-
cape, lest thou perish.” But Lot, afraid that they would not reach
the mountains in time and “would be overtaken by the Evil and
die,” had a suggestion: Could the upheavaling of Sodom be de-
layed until he had reached the town of Zoar, the farthest one away
from Sodom? Agreeing, one of the emissaries asked him to hurry
there: “Haste thee to escape thither, for I will be unable to do any-
thing until thou hast arrived there.”

The calamity was thus not only predictable and avoidable but
also postponable; and it could be made to afflict various cities at
different times. No natural catastrophe could have featured all
these aspects.

The sun was risen over the Earth when Lot arrived at Zoar;
And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah, from the skies,
brimstone and fire that had come from Yahweh.

And He upheavaled those cities and the whole plain,

and all the inhabitants of the cities

and all the vegetation that grows from the ground.

The cities, the people, the vegetation— everything was “upheav-
aled” by the gods’ weapon. Its heat and fire scorched all before it;
its radiation affected people even at some distance away: Lot’s
wife, ignoring the admonition not to stop to look back as they were
fleeing away from Sodom, turned to a “pillar of vapor.”* The
“Evil” Lot had feared had caught up with her. . . .

*The traditional and literal translation of the Hebrew term Netsiv
melah has been “pillar of salt,” and tracts have been written in the
Middle Ages explaining the process whereby a person could turn
into crystalline salt. However, if— as we believe— the mother
tongue of Abraham and Lot was Sumerian, and the event was first
recorded not in a Semitic language but in Sumerian, an entirely dif-
ferent and more plausible understanding of the fate of Lot’s wife be-
comes possible.

In a paper presented to the American Oriental Society in 1918 and
in a followup article in Beitrage zur Assyriologie, Paul Haupt had
shown conclusively that because the early sources of salt in Sumer
were swamps near the Persian Gulf, the Sumerian term NIMUR
branched off to mean both salt and vapor. Because the Dead Sea has
been called, in Hebrew, The Salt Sea, the biblical Hebrew narrator
probably misinterpreted the Sumerian term and wrote “pillar of
salt” when in fact Lot’s wife became a “pillar of vapor.” In this

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

One by one the cities “which had outraged the Lord’’ were up-
heavaled, and each time Lot was allowed to escape:

For when the gods devastated the cities of the plain,
the gods remembered Abraham, and sent Lot away
out of the upheavaling of the cities.

And Lot, as instructed, went on “to dwell in the moun-
tain. . . and dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters with him.”

Having witnessed the fiery destruction of all life in the Jordan
plain and the unseen hand of death which vaporized their mother,
what were Lot and his daughters to think? They thought, we leam
from the biblical narrative, that they had witnessed the end of man-
kind upop the Earth, that the three of them were the sole survivors
of the human race; and therefore, the only way to preserve man-
kind was to commit incest and have the daughters conceive chil-
dren by their own father. . . .

“And the elder said unto the younger: ‘Our father is old, and
there is not a man on Earth to squire us in the manner of all on
Earth; come, let us make our father drink wine, then lie down
with him, so that we shall preserve the seed of life from our fa-
ther.’ ” And having done so, both became pregnant and bore chil-
dren.

The night before the holocaust must have been a night of anxiety
and sleeplessness for Abraham, of wondering whether enough
Righteous Ones were found in Sodom to have the cities spared, of
concern about the fate of Lot and his family. “And Abraham got
up early in the morning to the place where he had stood facing Yah-
weh, and he looked in the direction of Sodom and Gomorrah and

connection it is noteworthy that in Ugaritic texts, such as the Ca-
naanite tale of Aqhat (with its many similarities to the tales of Abra-
ham) the death of a mortal by the hand of a god was described as the
“escape of his soul as vapor, like smoke from his nostrils.”

Indeed, in the Erra Epos which, we believe, was the Sumerian
record of the nuclear upheaval, the death of the people was de-
scribed by the god thus:

The people I will make vanish,
their souls shall turn to vapor.

It was the misfortune of Lot’s wife to be among those who were
“turned to vapor.”

The Nuclear Holocaust 315

the region of the Plain; and he beheld there smoke rising from the
earth as the smoke of a furnace.”

He was witnessing a “Hiroshima” and a “Nagasaki” —the de-
struction of a fertile and populated plain by atomic weapons. The
year was 2024 b.c.

Where are the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah today? An-
cient Greek and Roman geographers reported that the once-
fertile valley of the five cities was inundated following the
catastrophe. Modern scholars believe that the “upheavaling”
described in the Bible caused a breach in the southern shore of
the Dead Sea, letting its waters pour through to submerge the
low-lying region to the south. The remaining portion of what
was once the southern shore became the feature figuratively
called by the natives el-Lissan (“The Tongue”), and the once-
populated valley with its five cities became a new, southern
part of the Dead Sea (Fig. 102) still bearing the local nickname
“Lot’s Sea.” In the north the outpouring of the waters south-
ward caused the shoreline to recede.

The ancient reports have been confirmed in modem times by
various researches, beginning with an exhaustive exploration of
the area in the 1920s by a scientific mission sponsored by the Vati-
can’s Pontifical Biblical Institute (A. Mallon, Voyage d'Explora-
tion au sud-est de la Mer Morte). Leading archaeologists, such as
W. F. Albright and P. Harland, discovered that settlements in the
mountains around the region were abruptly abandoned in the
twenty-first century b.c. and were not reoccupied for several cen-
turies thereafter. And to this very day, the water of springs sur-
rounding the Dead Sea has been found to be contaminated with
radioactivity, “enough to induce sterility and allied afflictions in
any animals and humans that absorbed it over a number of years”
(I. M. Blake, “Joshua’s Curse and Elisha’s Miracle” in The
Palestine Exploration Quarterly).

The cloud of death, rising in the skies from the cities of the
plain, frightened not only Lot and his daughters but also Abraham,
and he did not feel safe even in the Hebron mountains, some fifty
miles away. We are told by the Bible that he pulled up his encamp-
ment and moved farther away westward, to reside at Gerar.

Also, at no time thereafter did he venture into the Sinai. Even
years later, when Abraham’s son Isaac wanted to go to Egypt on
account of a famine in Canaan, “Yahweh appeared unto him and
said: ‘Go not down to Egypt; dwell in the land which I will show

The Nuclear Holocaust 317

thee.’ ” The passage through the Sinai peninsula was apparently
still unsafe.

But why?

The destruction of the cities of the plain, we believe, was only a
sideshow: concurrently, the Spaceport in the Sinai peninsula was
also obliterated with nuclear weapons, leaving behind a deadly ra-
diation that lingered on for many years thereafter.

The main nuclear target was in the Sinai peninsula; and the real
victim, in the end, was Sumer itself.

Though the end of Ur came swiftly, its sad fate loomed darker
ever since the War of the Kings, coming nearer and nearer, like the
sound of a distant drummer— an execution’s drummer— getting
closer, growing louder with each passing year. The Year of
Doom — 2024 b.c. — was the sixth year of the reign of Ibbi-Sin, the
last king of Ur; but to find the reasons for the calamity, explana-
tions of its nature, and details of its scope, we will have to study the
records of those fateful years back from the time of that war.

Having failed in their mission and twice humiliated by the hand
of Abraham— once at Kadesh-Bamea, then again near Damascus—
the invading kings were promptly removed from their thrones. In
Ur, Amar-Sin was replaced by his brother Shu-Sin, who ascended
the throne to find the grand alliance shattered and Ur’s erstwhile al-
lies now nibbling at her crumbling empire.

Although they, too, had been discredited by the War of the
Kings, Nannar and Inanna were at first the gods in whom Shu-Sin
had put his trust. It was Nannar, Shu-Sin’s early inscriptions
stated, who had “called his name” to kingship; he was “beloved
of Inanna,” and she herself presented him to Nannar (Fig. 103).

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

“The Holy Inanna,” Shu-Sin boasted, “the one endowed with as-
tounding qualities, the First Daughter of Sin,” granted him weap-
ons with which to “engage in battle the enemy country which is
disobedient.” But all this was insufficient to hold together the Su-
merian empire, and Shu-Sin soon turned to greater gods for suc-
cor.

Judging from the date formulas— annual inscriptions, for royal
as well as commercial and social purposes, in which each succes-
sive year of a king’s reign was designated by the major event of
that year— Shu-Sin, in the second year of his reign, sought the
favors of Enki by constructing for that god a special boat that could
navigate the high seas all the way to the Lower World. The third
year of reign was also one of preoccupation with the pro-Enki
alignment. Little else is known of this effort, which could have
been a roundabout way of pacifying the followers of Marduk and
Nabu; but the effort evidently failed, for the fourth and fifth years
witnessed the building of a massive wall on the western frontier of
Mesopotamia, specifically aimed at warding off incursions by the
“Westerners,” followers of Marduk.

As the pressures from the west kept rising, Shu-Sin turned to the
great gods of Nippur for forgiveness and salvation. The date for-
mulas, confirmed by the archaeological excavations of the Ameri-
can Expedition to Nippur, reveal that Shu-Sin undertook massive
reconstruction works at Nippur’s sacred precinct, on a scale un-
known since the days of Ur-Nammu. The works culminated with
the raising of a stela honoring Enlil and Ninlil, “a stela as no king
had built before.” Desparately Shu-Sin sought acceptance, confir-
mation that he was “the king whom Enlil, in his heart, had
chosen.” But Enlil was not there to answer; only Ninlil, Enid's
spouse, who remained in Nippur, heard Shu-Sin's supplications.
Responding with compassion, “so as to prolong the well-being of
Shu-Sin, to extend the time of his crown,” she gave him a
“weapon which with radiance strikes down . . . whose awesome
flash reaches the sky.”

A Shu-Sin text catalogued as "Collection B” suggests that in his
efforts to reestablish the olden links with Nippur, Shu-Sin may
have attempted a reconciliation with the Nippurites (such as the
family of Terah) who had left Ur after the death of Ur-Nammu.
The text states that after he made the region where Harran was situ-
ated “tremble in awe of his weapons,” a peace gesture was made:
Shu-Sin sent there his own daughter as a bride (presumably to the
region’s chief or his son). She then returned to Sumer with an en-

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tourage of that region’s citizens, “establishing a town for Enlil and
Ninlil on the boundary of Nippur.” It was the first time “since the
days when fates were decreed, that a king had established a town
for Enlil and Ninlil,” Shu-Sin stated in obvious expectation of
praise. With the probable assistance of the repatriated Nippurites,
Shu-Sin also reinstated the high temple services at Nippur—
bestowing upon himself the role and title of High Priest.

Yet all this was to no avail. Instead of greater security, there
were greater dangers, and concern about the loyalty of distant
provinces gave way to worry about Sumer’s own territory. “The
mighty king, the King of Ur,” Shu-Sin’s inscriptions said, found
that the “shepherding of the land”— of Sumer itself— had become
the principal royal burden.

There was one final effort to entice Enlil back to Sumer, to find
shelter under his aegis. On the apparent advice of Ninlil, Shu-Sin
built for the divine couple “a great touring boat, fit for the largest
rivers. ... He decorated it perfectly with precious stones,”
outfitted it with oars made of the finest wood, punting poles and an
artful rudder, and furnished it with all manner of comfort including
a bridal bed. He then “placed the touring boat in the wide basin
facing Ninlil’s House of Pleasure.”

The nostalgic aspects struck a chord in Enlil’s heart, for he had
fallen in love with Ninlil, when she was still a young nurse, when
he saw her bathing naked in the river; and he did come back to
Nippur:

When Enlil heard [all this]

From horizon to horizon he hurried,

From south to north he travelled;

Through the skies, over earth he hurried,

To greatly rejoice with his beloved queen, Ninlil.

The sentimental journey, however, was only a brief interlude.
Some crucial lines before the end of the tablet are missing, so we
are deprived of the details of what happened then. But the very last
lines refer to “Ninurta, the great warrior of Enlil, who befuddled
the Intruder,” apparently after “an inscription, an evil inscrip-
tion” was discovered on an effigy in the boat, intended perhaps to
place a curse on Enlil and Ninlil.

There is no record available of Enlil’s reaction to the foul play;
but all other evidence suggests that he again left Nippur, this time
apparently taking Ninlil with him.

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Soon thereafter— February 2031 b.c. by our calendar— the Near
East was awed by a total lunar eclipse, which blacked out the moon
during the night for its full course from horizon to horizon. The or-
acle priests of Nippur could not allay Shu-Sin’s anxiety: It was,
they said in their written message, an omen “to the king who rules
the four regions: his wall will be destroyed, Ur will become deso-
late.”

Rejected by the great olden gods, Shu-Sin engaged in one final
act — either out of defiance or as a last straw to gain divine support.
He went ahead and built-in the very sacred precinct of Nippur— a
shrine to a young god named Shara. He was a son of Inanna; and
like Lugalbanda, who bore this epithet in earlier days, so was this
new Shara (“Prince”) a son of a king; in the inscription dedicating
the temple, Shu-Sin claimed that he was the young god’s father:
“To divine Shara, heavenly hero, the beloved son of Inanna: His
father Shu-Sin, the powerful king, king of Ur, king of the four re-
gions, has built for him the temple Shagipada, his beloved shrine;
may the king have life.” It was the ninth year of Shu-Sin’s reign. It
was also his last.

The new ruler on the throne of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, could not stop the
retreat and retrenchment. All he could do was rush the construction
of walls and fortifications in the heart of Sumer, around Ur and
Nippur; the rest of the country was left unprotected. His own date
formulas, of which none have been found beyond his fifth year (al-
though he reigned longer), tell little of the circumstances of his
days; much more is learned from the cessation of other customary
messages and trade documents. Thus, the messages of loyalty,
which the other subordinate urban centers were expected to send to
Ur each year, ceased to arrive from one center after the other. First
to cease were the loyalty messages from the western districts; then,
in the third year, the capitals of eastern provinces stopped their dis-
patch. In that third year Ur’s foreign commerce “stopped with a
significant suddenness” (in the words of C. J. Gadd, History and
Monuments of Ur). At the tax collection crossroads of Drehem
(near Nippur), where shipments of goods and cattle and the collec-
tion of taxes thereon were recorded throughout the Third Dynasty
of Ur— records of which thousands of intact clay tablets were
found— the meticulous account-keeping also stopped abruptly in
that third year.

Ignoring Nippur, whose great gods had left her, Ibbi-Sin put his
trust again in Nannar and Inanna, installing himself in his second
year as High Priest of Inanna's temple in Uruk. Repeatedly he

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asked for guidance and reassurance from his gods; but all he was
hearing were oracles of destruction and doom. In the fourth year of
his reign he was told that “The Son in the west will arise . . . it is
an omen for Ibbi-Sin: Ur shall be judged.”

In the fifth year. Ibbi-Sin sought further strength by becoming
High Priest of Inanna at her shrine at Ur. But that, too, was of no
help: that year, the other cities of Sumer itself ceased sending the
messages of allegiance. It was also the last year in which those
cities delivered the traditional sacrificial animals for Nannar’s tem-
ple in Ur. The central authority of Ur, her gods, and her great
ziggurat-temple were no longer recognized.

As the sixth year began, the omens “concerning destruction”
became more urgent and more specific. “When the sixth year
comes, the inhabitants of Ur will be trapped,” one omen stated.
The prophesied calamity shall come, another omen said, “When,
for the second time, he who calls himself Supreme, like one whose
chest has been anointed, shall come from the west.” That very
year, as messages from the borders reveal, “hostile Westerners
had entered the plain” of Mesopotamia; without resistance, they
quickly “entered the interior of the country, taking one by one all
the great fortresses.”

All Ibbi-Sin held on to was the enclave of Ur and Nippur; but
before the fateful sixth year was out, the inscriptions honoring the
king of Ur stopped abruptly also in Nippur. The enemy of Ur and
her gods, the “One who calls himself Supreme,” had reached the
heart of Sumer.

Marduk, as the omens had predicted, returned to Babylon for the
second time.

The twenty-four fateful years— since Abraham left Harran, since
Shulgi was replaced on the throne, since Marduk’s exile among the
Hittites had begun— have all converged in that Year of Doom,
2024 b.c. Having followed the separate, but interconnected, bibli-
cal tale of Abraham and the fortunes of Ur and its last three kings,
we will now follow in the footsteps of Marduk.

The tablet on which Marduk’s autobiography is inscribed (from
which we have already partly quoted) continues to relate his return
to Babylon after the twenty-four years of sojourn in the Land of
Hatti:

In Hatti-land I asked an oracle

[about] my throne and my Lordship;

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In its midst [I asked]: “Until when?”

24 years, in its midst, I nested.

Then, in that twenty-fourth year, he received a favorable omen:

My days [of exile] were completed;

To my city I [set my course];

My temple Esagila as a mount [to raise/rebuild].

My everlasting abode to [reestablish].

I raised my heels [toward Babylon]

Through . . . lands [I went] to my city

her [future? well-being?] to establish,

A king in Babylon to [install]

In the house of my covenant . . .

In the mountlike Esagil . . .

By Anu created . . .

Into the Esagil . . .

A platform to raise . . .

In my city . . .

Joy . . .

The damaged tablet then lists the cities through which Marduk
had passed on his way to Babylon. The few legible city names indi-
cate that Marduk’s route from Asia Minor to Mesopotamia took
him first south to the city of Hama (the biblical Hamat), then
eastward via Mari (see map, page 304). He had indeed come to
Mesopotamia— as the omens had predicted— from the west, ac-
companied by Amorite (“Westerners”) supporters.

His wish, Marduk continued, was to bring peace and prosperity
to the land, “chase away evil and bad luck . . . bring motherly
love to Mankind.” But it all came to naught: Against his city, Bab-
ylon, an adversary god “his wrath had brought.” The name of this
adversary god is stated at the very beginning of a new column of
the text; but all that has remained of it is the first syllable: “Divine
NIN-.” The reference could have been only to Ninurta.

We learn little from this tablet of the actions taken by this adver-
sary, for all the subsequent verses are badly damaged and the text
becomes unintelligible. But we can pick up some of the missing
threads from the third tablet of the Khedorlaomer Texts. In spite of
its enigmatic aspects, it paints a picture of total turmoil, with ad-
versary gods marching against each other at the head of their hu-
man troops: the Amorite supporters of Marduk swooped down the

The Nuclear Holocaust 323

Euphrates valley toward Nippur, and Ninurta organized Elamite
troops to fight them.

As we read and reread the record of those trying times, we find
that to accuse an enemy of atrocities is not a modem innovation.
The Babylonian text — written, we must keep bearing in mind, by a
worshiper of Marduk — attributes to the Elamite troops, and to
them alone, the desecration of temples, including the shrines of
Shamash and Ishtar. The Babylonian chronicler goes even farther:
he accuses Ninurta of falsely blaming on the followers of Marduk
the desecration of Enlil’s Holy-of-Holies in Nippur, thereby pro-
voking Enlil to take sides against Marduk and his son Nabu.

It happened, the Babylonian text relates, when the two opposing
armies faced each other at Nippur. It was then that the holy city
was despoiled and its shrine, the Ekur, desecrated. Ninurta ac-
cused the followers of Marduk of this evil deed; but it was not so: it
was his ally Erra who had done it!

How Nergal/Erra suddenly appears in the Babylonian chronicle
will remain a puzzle until we return to the Erra Epic; but that this
god is named in the Khedorlaomer Texts and is accused of the de-
filement of the Ekur, there can be no doubt:

Erra, the pitiless one,
entered the sacred precinct.

He stationed himself in the sacred precinct,
he beheld the Ekur.

His mouth he opened, he said to his young men:

“Carry off the spoil of Ekur,

take away its valuables,

destroy its foundation,

break down the enclosure of the shrine!”

When Enlil, “loftily enthroned,” heard that his temple had been
destroyed, its shrine defiled, that “in the holy of holies the veil was
tom away,” he rushed back to Nippur. “Riding in front of him
were gods clothed with radiance”; he himself “set off brilliance
like lightning” as he came down from the skies (Fig. 104); “he
made the holy place shake” as he descended to the sacred precinct.
Enlil then addressed himself to his son, “the prince Ninurta,” to
find out who had defiled the sacred place. But instead of telling the
truth, that it was Erra, his ally, Ninurta pointed the accusing finger
at Marduk and his followers. . . .

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 104

Describing the scene, the Babylonian text asserts that Ninurta
was acting without the required respect on meeting his father: “not
fearing for his life, he removed not his tiara.” To Enlil “evil he
spoke . . . there was no justice; destruction was conceived.” And
so provoked, “Enlil against Babylon caused evil to be planned.”

In addition to “evil deeds” against Marduk and Babylon, an at-
tack against Nabu and his temple Ezida in Borsippa was also
planned. But Nabu managed to escape westward, to the cities faith-
ful to him near the Mediterranean Sea:

From Ezida . . .

Nabu, to marshal all his cities
set his step;

Toward the great sea he set his course.

Now there follow verses in the Babylonian text that have a direct
parallel in the biblical tale of the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah:

But when the son of Marduk
in the land of the coast was,

He-of-the-Evil-Wind [Erra]
with heat the plain-land burnt.

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These are indeed verses that must have had a common source
with the biblical description of how "brimstone and fire" rained
from the skies "upheavaled those cities and the whole plain"!

As biblical statements (e.g., Deuteronomy 29:22-27) attested,
the "wickedness" of the citjes of the Jordan Plain was that “they
had forsaken the covenant of the Lord . . . and they went and
served other gods.” As we now learn from the Babylonian text, the
"outcry” (accusation) against them was their rallying to the side of
Marduk and Nabu in that last clash between the contending gods.
But whereas the biblical text left it at that, the Babylonian text adds
another important detail: The attack on the Canaanite cities was in-
tended not only to destroy the centers of support for Marduk, but
also to destroy Nabu, who had sought asylum there. However, that
second aim was not achieved, for Nabu managed to slip out in time
and escaped to an island in the Mediterranean, where the people
accepted him although he was not their god:

He [Nabu| the great sea entered.

Sat upon a throne which was not his

[Because] Ezida, the legitimate abode, was overrun.

The picture that can be gathered from the biblical and Babylo-
nian texts of the cataclysm that engulfed the ancient Near East in
the time of Abraham is much more fully detailed in The Erra Epic
(to which we have already referred earlier). First pieced together
from fragments found in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh,
the Assyrian text began to take shape and meaning as more frag-
mented versions were unearthed at other archaeological sites. By
now it is definitely established that the text was inscribed on five
tablets; and in spite of breaks, missing or incomplete lines, and
even some disagreement among the scholars where some frag-
ments belong, two extensive translations have been compiled: Das
Era-Epos by P. F. Gossmann, and L’Epopea di Erra by L. Cagni.

The Erra Epic not only explains the nature and causes of the con-
flict that had led to the unleashing of the Ultimate Weapon against
inhabited cities and the attempt to annihilate a god (Nabu) believed
hiding therein. It also makes clear that such an extreme measure
was not taken lightly.

We know from several other texts that the great gods, at that
time of acute crisis, were sitting in a continuous Council of War,
keeping constant communication with Anu: “Anu to Earth the
words was speaking. Earth to Anu the words pronounced.” The

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

32 $

Erra Epic adds the information that before the awesome weapons
were used, one more confrontation had taken place between
Nergal/Erra and Marduk, in which Nergal used threats to persuade
his brother to leave Babylon and give up his claims to Supremacy.

But this time, persuasion failed; and back at the Council of the
Gods, Nergal voiced the recommendation for the use of force to
dislodge Marduk. We learn from the texts that the discussions were
heated and acrimonious; “for one day and one night, without
ceasing” they went on. An especially violent argument developed
between Enki and his son Nergal, in which Enki stood by his
firstborn son: “Now that Prince Marduk has arisen, now that the
people for the second time have raised his image, why does Erra
continue his opposition?” Enki asked. Finally, losing his patience,
Enki shouted at Nergal to get out of his presence.

Leaving in a huff, Nergal returned to his domain. “Consulting
with himself,” he decided to unleash the awesome weapons: “The
lands I will destroy, to a dust-heap make them; the cities I will up-
heaval, to desolation turn them; the mountains I will flatten, their
animals make disappear; the seas I will agitate, that which teems in
them I will decimate; the people I will make vanish, their souls
shall turn to vapor; none shall be spared. ...”

We leam from a text known as CT-xvi-44/4^ that it was Gibil,
whose domain in Africa adjoined that of Nergal, who alerted Mar-
duk to the destructive scheme hatched by Nergal. It was nighttime,
and the great gods had adjourned for rest. It was then that Gibil
“these words to Marduk did speak” in regard to the “seven awe-
some weapons which by Anu were created; . . . The wickedness
of those seven against thee is being laid,” he informed Marduk.

Alarmed, Marduk inquired of Gibil where the awesome weapons
were kept. “O Gibil,” he said, “those seven— where were they
bom, where were they created?” To which Gibil revealed that they
were hidden underground:

Those seven, in the mountain they abide,

In a cavity inside the earth they dwell.

From this place with a brilliance they will rush forth.

From Earth to Heaven, clad with terror.

But where exactly is this place? Marduk asked again and again;
and all Gibil could say was that “even the wise gods, to them it is
unknown.”

Now Marduk rushed to his father Enki with the frightening re-

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327

port. “To his father Enki’s house he [Marduk] entered.” Enki was
lying on the couch in the chamber to which he retired for the night.
“My father,” Marduk said, “Gibil this word hath spoken to me:
of the coming of the seven | weapons] he has found out.” Telling
his father the bad news, he urged his all-knowing father: “Their
place to search out, do hasten thou!”

Soon the gods were back in council, for even Enki knew not the
exact hiding place of the Ultimate Weapons. To his surprise, not
all the other gods were as shocked as he was. Enki spoke out
strongly against the idea, urging steps to stop Nergal, for the use of
the weapons, he pointed out, “the lands would make desolate, the
people will make perish.” Nannar and Utu wavered as Enki
spoke; but Enlil and Ninurta were for decisive action. And so, with
the Council of the Gods in disarray, the decision was left to Anu.

When Ninurta finally arrived in the Lower World with word of
Anu’s decision, he found out that Nergal had already ordered the
priming of “the seven awesome weapons” with their “poisons”—
their nuclear warheads. Though the Erra Epic keeps referring to
Ninurta by the epithet Is hum (“The Scorcher”), it relates in great
detail how Ninurta had made clear to Nergal/Erra that the weapons
could be used only against specifically approved targets; that be-
fore they could be used, the Anunnaki gods at the selected sites and
the Igigi gods manning the space platform and the shuttlecraft had
to be forewarned; and, last but not least, mankind had to be spared,
for “Anu, lord of the gods, on the land had pity.”

At first Nergal balked at the very idea of forewarning anyone,
and the ancient text goes to some length to relate the tough words
exchanged between the two gods. Nergal then agreed to giving ad-
vance warning to the Anunnaki and Igigi who manned the space fa-
cilities, but not to Marduk and his son Nabu, nor to the human
followers of Marduk. It was then that Ninurta, attempting to dis-
suade Nergal from indiscriminate annihilation, used words iden-
tical to those attributed in the Bible to Abraham when he tried to
have Sodom spared:

Valiant Erra,

Will you the righteous destroy with the unrighteous?

Will you destroy those who have against you sinned

together with those who against you have not sinned?

Employing flattery, threats, and logic, the two gods argued back
and forth on the extent of the destruction. More than Ninurta,

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Nergal was consumed by personal hatred: “I shall annihilate the
son, and let the father bury him; then I shall kill the father, let no
one bury him!” he shouted. Employing diplomacy, pointing out
the injustice of indiscriminate destruction— and the strategic merits
of selective targeting— the words of Ninurta finally swayed Nergal.
‘‘He heard the words spoken by Ishum [Ninurta]; the words ap-
pealed to him as fine oil.” Agreeing to leave alone the seas, to
leave Mesopotamia out of the attack, he formulated a modified
plan: the destruction will be selective; the tactical aim will be to de-
stroy the cities where Nabu might be hiding; the strategic aim wil!
be to deny to Marduk his greatest prize— the Spaceport, ‘‘the place
from where the Great Ones ascend”:

From city to city an emissary I will send;

The son, seed of his father, shall not escape;

His mother shall cease her laughter . . .

To the place of the gods, access he shall not have:

The place from where the Great Ones ascend
I shall upheaval.

When Nergal finished presenting this latest plan, involving as it
did the destruction of the Spaceport, Ninurta was speechless. But,
as other texts assert, Enlil approved the plan when it was brought to
his decision; so also, apparently, did Anu. Wasting no more time,
Nergal then urged Ninurta that the two of them go at once into ac-
tion:

Then did the hero Erra go ahead of Ishum,
remembering his words;

Ishum too went forth, in accordance with the word given,
a squeezing in his heart.

Their first target was the Spaceport, its command complex hid-
den in the ‘‘Mount Most Supreme,” its landing fields spread in the
adjoining great plain:

Ishum to Mount Most Supreme set his course;

The Awesome Seven, [weapons] without parallel,
trailed behind him.

At the Mount Most Supreme the hero arrived;

He raised his hand —
the mount was smashed;

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329

The plain by the Mount Most Supreme
he then obliterated;

in its forests not a tree-stem was left standing.

So, with one nuclear blow, the Spaceport was obliterated, the
mount within which its controls were hidden smashed, the plain
that served its runways obliterated. . . . It was a destructive feat,
the written record attests, performed by Ninurta (Ishum).

Now it was the turn of Nergal (Erra) to give vent to his vow of
vengeance. Guiding himself from the Sinai peninsula to the Ca-
naanite cities by following the King’s Highway, Erra upheavaled
them. The words employed by the Erra Epic are almost identical to
those used in the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah:

Then, emulating Ishum,

Erra the King’s Highway followed.

The cities he finished off,
to desolation he overturned them.

In the mountains he caused starvation,
their animals he made perish.

The verses that follow may well describe the creation of the new
southern portion of the Dead Sea, by breaking through its southern
shoreline, and the elimination of all marine life therein:

He dug through the sea,
its wholeness he divided.

That which lives in it,
even the crocodiles
he made wither.

As with fire he scorched the animals,
banned its grains to become as dust.

The Erra Epic thus encompasses all the three aspects of the nu-
clear event: the obliteration of the Spaceport in the Sinai; the
“overturning” (“ upheaval ing” in the Bible) of the cities of the
Jordan plain; and the breach in the Dead Sea resulting in its exten-
sion southward. One could expect that such a unique destructive
event would have been recorded and mentioned in more than a
single text; and indeed we find descriptions and recollections of the
nuclear upheaval in other texts as well.

One such text (known as K.5001 and published in the Oxford

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Editions of Cuneiform Texts, vol. VI) is especially valuable, be-
cause it is in the original Sumerian language and, moreover, it is a
bilingual text in which the Sumerian is accompanied by a line-by-
line Akkadian translation. It is thus undoubtedly one of the earliest
texts on the subject; and its wording indeed gives the impression
that it is this or similar Sumerian originals that had served as a
source for the biblical narrative. Addressed to a god whose identity
is not clear from the fragment, it says:

Lord, bearer of the Scorcher
that burnt up the adversary;

Who obliterated the disobedient land;

Who withered the life of the Evil Word’s followers;

Who rained stones and fire upon the adversaries.

The deed performed by the two gods Ninurta and Nergal, when
the Anunnaki guarding the Spaceport, forewarned, had to escape
by “ascending to the dome of heaven,” was recalled in a Babylo-
nian text in which one king recalled the momentous events that had
taken place “in the reign of an earlier king.” Here are the king’s
words:

At that time,

in the reign of a previous king,
conditions changed.

Good departed, suffering was regular.

The Lord [of the gods] became enraged,
he conceived wrath.

He gave the command:

the gods of that place abandoned it . . .

The two, incited to commit the evil,

made its guardians stand aside;

its protectors went up to the dome of heaven.

The Khedorlaomer Text, which identifies the two gods by their
epithets as Ninurta and Nergal, tells it this way:

Enlil, who sat enthroned in loftiness,
was consumed with anger.

The devastators again suggested evil;

He who scorches with fire [Ishum/Ninurta]

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331

and he of the evil wind [Erra/Nergal]
together performed their evil.

The two made the gods flee,
made them flee the scorching.

The target, from which they made the gods guarding it flee, was
the Place of Launching:

That which was raised towards Anu to launch
they caused to wither;

Its face they made fade away,
its place they made desolate.

Thus was the Spaceport, the prize over which so many Wars of
the Gods had been fought, obliterated: the Mount within which the
controlling equipment was placed was smashed; the launch plat-
forms were made to fade off the face of the Earth; and the plain
whose hard soil the shuttlecraft had used as runways was obliter-
ated, with not even a tree left standing.

The great place was never to be seen again . . . but the scar
made in the face of the Earth that awesome day can still be
seen — to this very day! It is a vast scar, so vast that its features can
be seen only from the skies— revealed only in recent years as satel-
lites began to photograph the Earth (Fig. 105). It is a scar for which
no scientist has hitherto offered an explanation.

Stretching north of this enigmatic feature in the face of the Sinai
peninsula is the flat central plain of the Sinai — a remnant of a lake
from an earlier geological era; its flat, hard soil is ideal for the
landing of shuttlecraft— the vei^ same reason which made the Mo-
jave Desert in California and the Edwards Air Force Base there
ideal for the landing of America’s space shuttles.

As one stands in this great plain in the Sinai peninsula— its hard,
flat soil having served for tank battles in recent history as it
did the shuttlecraft in antiquity — one can see in the distance
the mountains that surround the plain and give it its oval shape.
The limestone mountains loom white on the horizon; but where the
great central plain adjoins the immense scar in the Sinai, the hue of
the plain— black— stands out in sharp contrast to the surrounding
whiteness (Fig. 106).

Black is not a natural hue in the Sinai peninsula, where the
whiteness of the limestone and the redness of the sandstone com-
bine to dazzle the eye with hues ranging from bright yellow to light

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

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333

gray and dark brown but nowhere the black which comes in nature
from basalt stones.

Yet here, in the central plain north-northeast of the enigmatic
giant scar, the soil’s color has a black hue. It is caused— as our pho-
tograph clearly shows— by millions upon millions of bits and
pieces of blackened rock, strewn as by a giant hand over the whole
area (Fig. 107).

There has been no explanation for the colossal scar in the face of
the Sinai peninsula since it was observed from the skies and photo-
graphed by NASA satellites. There has been no explanation for the
blackened bits and pieces of rock strewn over the area in the central
plain. No explanation— unless one reads the verses of the ancient
texts and accepts our conclusion that in the days of Abraham,
Nergal and Ninurta wiped out the Spaceport that was there with
nuclear weapons: “That which was raised towards Anu to launch
they caused to wither, its face they made fade away, its place they
made desolate.”

And the Spaceport, even the Evil Cities, were no more.

Far away to the west, in Sumer itself, the nuclear blasts and their
brilliant flashes were neither felt nor seen. But the deed done by Nergal
and Ninurta had not gone unrecorded, for it turned out to have had a
most profound effect on Sumer, its people, and its very existence.

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THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Fig. 107

For, in spite of all the efforts of Ninurta to dissuade Nergal from
harming mankind, a great suffering did ensue. Though the two had
not intended it, the nuclear explosion gave rise to an immense
wind, a radioactive wind, which began as a whirlwind:

A storm, the Evil Wind,
went around in the skies.

And then the radioactive whirlwind began to spread and move
westward with the prevailing winds blowing from the Mediterra-
nean; soon thereafter, the omens predicting the end of Sumer came
true; and Sumer itself became the ultimate nuclear victim.

The catastrophe that befell Sumer at the end of Ibbi-Sin’s sixth
year of reign is described in several Lamentation Texts— long
poems that bewail the demise of the majestic Ur and the other cen-
ters of the great Sumerian civilization. Bringing very much to mind

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335

the biblical Book of Lamentations, lamenting the destruction of Je-
rusalem by the hands of the Babylonians, the Sumerian lamenta-
tions suggested to the scholars who had first translated them that
the Mesopotamian catastrophe was also the result of an invasion —
this one by clashing Elamite and Amorite troops.

When the first lamentation tablets were found, the scholars be-
lieved that Ur alone suffered destruction, and they titled the trans-
lations accordingly. But as more texts were discovered, it was
realized that Ur was neither the only city affected, nor the focal
point of the catastrophe. Not only were similar lamentations found
bewailing the fate of Nippur, Uruk, Eridu, but some of the texts
also provided lists of the affected cities: they appeared to begin in
the southwest and extend to the northeast, encompassing the whole
of southern Mesopotamia. It became apparent that a general, sud-
den, and concurrent catastrophe had befallen all the cities — not in
slow succession, as would happen in the case of a progressive inva-
sion, but all at once. Such scholars as Th. Jacobsen (The Reign
of Ibbi-Sin) then concluded that the “barbarian invaders” had
nothing to do with the “dire catastrophe,” a calamity he called
“really quite puzzling.”

“Whether we shall ever see with full clarity what happened in
those years,” Jacobsen wrote, “only time will tell; the full stoiy,
we are convinced, is still far beyond our grasp.”

But the puzzle can be solved, and the full story grasped, if we
relate the catastrophe in Mesopotamia to the nuclear explosion in
the Sinai.

The texts, remarkable for their length and in many instances also
in excellent state of preservation, usually begin by bewailing the
abrupt abandonment of all of Sumer’s sacred precincts by their var-
ious gods, their temples “abandoned to the wind.” The desolation
caused by the catastrophe is then described vividly, by such verses
as these:

Causing cities to be desolated,

[causing] houses to become desolate;

Causing stalls to be desolate,
the sheepfolds to be emptied;

That Sumer’s oxen no longer stand in their stalls,
that its sheep no longer roam in its sheepfolds;

That its rivers flow with water that is bitter,
that its cultivated fields grow weeds,
that its steppes grow withering plants.

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33 ^

In the cities and the hamlets, “the mother cares not for her chil-
dren, the father says not ‘O my wife’ ... the young child grows
not sturdy on their knee, the nursemaid chants not a lullaby . . .
kingship has been taken away from the land."

Before World War II had ended, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were upheavaled with atomic weapons rained on them from the
skies, one could still read the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah
and leave be the traditional “sulphur and brimstone" for lack of a
better explanation. To scholars who had not yet come face-to-face
with the awesomeness of nuclear weapons, the Sumerian lamenta-
tion texts bespoke (as the scholars titled them) the "Destruction of
Ur” or the “Destruction of Sumer.” But that is not what these
texts describe: they describe desolation, not destruction. The cities
were there but without people; the stalls were there but without cat-
tle; the sheepfolds remained but were empty; the rivers flowed but
their waters became bitter; the fields still stretched but they grew
only weeds; and on the steppe the plants sprouted, only to wither
away.

Invasion, war, killing— all those evils were well known to man-
kind by then; but, as the lamentation texts clearly state, this one
was unique and never experienced before:

On the Land [Sumer] fell a calamity,

one unknown to man:

One that had never been seen before,

one which could not be withstood.

The death was not by the hand of an enemy; it was an unseen
death, “which roams the street, is let loose in the road; it stands
beside a man— yet none can see it; when it enters a house, its ap-
pearance is unknown.” There was no defense against this “evil
which has assailed the land like a ghost: . . . The highest wall, the
thickest walls, it passes as a flood; no door can shut it out, no bolt
can turn it back; through the door like a snake it glides, through the
hinge like a wind it blows in.” Those who hid behind doors were
felled inside; those who ran to the rooftops died on the rooftops;
those who fled to the streets were stricken in the streets: “Cough
and phlegm weakened the chest, the mouth was filled with spittle
and foam . . . dumbness and daze have come upon them, an un-
wholesome numbness ... an evil curse, a headache . . . their
spirit abandoned their bodies.” As they died, it was a most grue-
some death:

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The people, terrified, could hardly breathe;

the Evil Wind clutched them,

does not grant them another day . . .

Mouths were drenched in blood,
heads wallowed in blood . . .

The face was made pale by the Evil Wind.

The source of the unseen death was a cloud that appeared in the
skies of Sumer and “covered the land as a cloak, spread over it like
a sheet.” Brownish in color, during the daytime “the sun in the ho-
rizon it obliterated with darkness.” At night, luminous at its edges
(“Girt with dread brilliance it filleth the broad earth”) it blocked
out the moon: “the moon at its rising it extinguished.” Moving
from west to east, the deathly cloud— “enveloped in terror, casting
fear everywhere” — was carried to Sumer by a howling wind, “a
great wind which speeds high above, an evil wind which over-
whelms the land.”

It was not, however, a natural phenomenon. It was “a great
storm directed from Anu ... it hath come from the heart of En-
lil.” The product of the seven awesome weapons, “in a single
spawning it was spawned . . . like the bitter venom of the gods; in
the west it was spawned.” The Evil Wind, “bearing gloom from
city to city, carrying dense clouds that bring gloom from the sky,”
was the result of a “lightning flash:” “From the midst of the
mountains it had descended upon the land, from the Plain of No
Pity it hath come.”

Though the people were baffled, the gods knew the cause of the
Evil Wind:

An evil blast heralded the baleful storm.

An evil blast the forerunner
of the baleful storm was;

Mighty offspring, valiant sons
were the heralds of the pestilence.

The two valiant sons— Ninurta and Nergal — unleashed “in a
single spawning” the seven awesome weapons created by Anu,
“uprooting everything, upheavaling everything” at the place of
the blast. The ancient descriptions are as vivid, as accurate as mod-
em eyewitness descriptions of an atomic explosion: As soon as the
“awesome weapons” were launched from the skies, there was an

338

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immense brilliance: “they spread awesome rays towards the four
points of the earth, scorching everything like fire,” one text stated;
another, a lamentation over Nippur, recalled “the storm, in a flash
of lightning created.” An atomic mushroom— "a dense cloud that
brings gloom”— then rose to the sky; it was followed by “rushing
wind gusts ... a tempest that furiously scorches the heavens.”
Then the prevailing winds, blowing from west to east, began to
spread toward Mesopotamia: “the dense clouds that bring gloom
from the sky, that bear the gloom from city to city.”

Not one, but several, texts attest that the Evil Wind, bearing the
cloud of death, was caused by gigantic explosions on a day to re-
member:

On that day

When heaven was crushed
and the Earth was smitten,
its face obliterated by the maelstrom—

When the skies were darkened
and covered as with a shadow . . .

The lamentation texts identified the site of the awesome blasts as
“in the west,” near “the breast of the sea” — a graphic description
of the curving Mediterranean coast at the Sinai peninsula— from a
plain “in the midst of the mountains,” a plain that became a
“Place of No Pity.” It was a place that served before as the Place
of Launching, the place from which the gods ascended toward
Anu. In addition, a mount also featured in many of these place
identifications. In the Erra Epic, the mount near “the place from
which Great Ones ascend” was called the “Mount Most Su-
preme”; in one of the lamentations it was called the “Mount of
Howling Tunnels.” This last epithet brings to mind the descrip-
tions, in the Pyramid Texts, of the tunneled mount with sloping un-
derground passages, to which Egyptian Pharaohs journeyed in
search of an afterlife. In 77;c Stairway to Heaven we have identi-
fied it with the mount Gilgamesh had reached in his journey to the
Place of the Rocketships, in the Sinai peninsula.

Starting from that mount, a lamentation text stated, the blast’s
deadly cloud was carried by the prevailing winds eastward all the
way “to the boundary of Anshan” in the Zagros Mountains, affect-
ing all of Sumer from Eridu in the south to Babylon in the north.
The unseen death moved slowly over Sumer, its passage lasting

The Nuclear Holocaust

339

twenty-four hours— a day and a night that were commemorated in
laments, as in this one from Nippur: “On that day, on that single
day; on that night, on that single night . . . the storm, in a flash of
lightning created, the people of Nippur left prostrate.”

The Uruk Lament vividly describes the confusion among both
the gods and the populace. Stating that Anu and Enlil had over-
ruled Enki and Ninki when they “determined the consensus” to
employ the nuclear weapons, the text asserts that none of the gods
anticipated the awesome outcome: “The great gods paled at its im-
mensity” as they witnessed the explosion’s “gigantic rays reach
up to heaven [and] the earth tremble to its core.”

As the Evil Wind began to “spread to the mountains as a net,”
the gods of Sumer began to flee their beloved cities. The text
known as Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur lists all the great
gods and some of their important sons and daughters who had
“abandoned to the wind” the cities and great temples of Sumer.
The text called Lamentation Over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur
adds dramatic details to this hurried abandonment. Thus, “Ninhar-
sag wept in bitter tears” as she escaped from Isin; Nanshe cried,
“O my devastated city” as “her beloved dwelling place was
given over to misfortune.” Inanna hurriedly departed from Uruk,
sailing off toward Africa in a “submersible ship” and complaining
that she had to leave behind her jewelry and other posses-
sions. ... In her own lamentation for Uruk, Inanna/Ishtar be-
wailed the desolation of her city and her temple by the Evil Wind
“which in an instant, in a blink of an eye was created in the midst
of the mountains,” and against which there was no defense.

A breathtaking description of the fear and confusion, among
gods and men alike, as the Evil Wind approached is given in The
Uruk Lament text, which was written years later as the time of Res-
toration came. As the “loyal citizens of Uruk were seized with
terror,” the resident deities of Uruk, those in charge of the city’s
administration and welfare, set off an alarm. “Rise up!” they
called to the people in the middle of the night; run away, “hide in
the steppe!” they instructed them. But then, these gods them-
selves, “the deities ran off . . . they took unfamiliar paths.”
Gloomily the text states;

Thus all its gods evacuated Uruk;

They kept away from it;

They hid in the mountains.

They escaped to the distant plains.

340

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

In Uruk, the populace was left in chaos, leaderless and helpless.
“Mob panic was brought about in Uruk . . . its good sense was
distorted.” The shrines were broken in and their contents were
smashed as the people asked questions: “Why did the gods' benev-
olent eye look away? Who caused such worry and lamentation?”
But their questions remained unanswered; and when the Evil Storm
passed over, “the people were piled up in heaps . . . a hush settled
over Uruk like a cloak.”

Ninki, we learn from The Eridu Lament, flew away from her
city to a safe haven in Africa: “Ninki, its great lady, flying like a
bird, left her city.” But Enki left Eridu only far enough to get out
of the Evil Wind’s way, yet near enough to see its fate: “Its lord
stayed outside his city .... Father Enki stayed outside the city
... for the fate of his harmed city he wept with bitter tears.”
Many of his loyal subjects followed him, camping on its outskirts.
For a day and a night they watched the storm “put its hand” on
Eridu.

After the “evil-bearing storm went out of the city, sweeping
across the countryside,” Enki surveyed Eridu; he found a city
“smothered with silence ... its residents stacked up in heaps.”
Those who were saved addressed to him a lament: “O Enki,”
they cried, “thy city has been cursed, made like an alien terri-
tory!” and they kept on asking whence should they go, what
should they do. But though the Evil Wind had passed, the place
was still unsafe, and Enki “stayed out of his city as though it were
an alien city.” “Forsaking the house of Eridu,” Enki then led
“those who have been displaced from Eridu” to the desert, “to-
wards an inimical land”; there he used his scientific powers to
make the “foul tree” edible.

From the northern edge of the Evil Wind’s wide swath, from
Babylon, a worried Marduk sent his father, Enki, an urgent mes-
sage as the cloud of death neared his city: “What am I to do?” he
asked. Enki’s advice, which Marduk then related to his followers,
was that those who could should leave the city— but go only north;
and in line with the advice given by the two emissaries to Lot, the
people fleeing Babylon were warned “neither to turn nor to look
back.” They were also told not to take with them any food or bev-
erage, for these might have been “touched by the ghost.” If escape
was not possible, Enki advised hiding underground: “Get thee into
a chamber below the earth, into a darkness,” until the Evil Wind
was gone.

The storm’s slow advance misled some of the gods into costly

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341

delays. In Lagash, “mother Bau wept bitterly for her holy temple,
for her city.” Though Ninurta was gone, his spouse could not force
herself to leave. Lingering behind, “O my city, O my city,” she
kept crying; the delay almost cost her her life:

On that day, the lady—
the storm caught up with her;

Bau, as if she were mortal—
the storm caught up with her . . .

In Ur we learn from the lamentations (one of which was com-
posed by Ningal herself) that Nannar and Ningal refused to be-
lieve that the end of Ur was irrevocable. Nannar addressed a long
and emotional appeal to his father Enlil, seeking some means to
avert the calamity. But “Enlil answered his son Sin" that the fate
could not be changed:

Ur was granted kingship —

it was not granted an eternal reign.

Since days of yore, when Sumer was founded,
to the present, when people have multiplied—

Who has ever seen a kingship of everlasting reign?

While the appeals were made, Ningal recalled in her long poem,
“the storm was ever breaking forward, its howling overpowering
all.” It was daytime when the Evil Wind approached Ur; “al-
though of that day I still tremble," Ningal wrote, “of that day's
foul smell we did not flee.” As night came, “a bitter lament was
raised” in Ur; yet the god and goddess stayed on; “of that night’s
foulness we did not flee," the goddess stated. Then the affliction
reached the great ziggurat of Ur, and Ningal realized that Nannar
“had been overtaken by the evil storm.”

Ningal and Nannar spent a night of nightmare, which Ningal
vowed never to forget, in the “termite house” (underground
chamber) within the ziggurat. Only next day, when “the storm was
carried off from the city,” did “Ningal, in order to go from her city
. . . hastily put on a garment,” and together with the stricken
Nannar departed from the city they so loved.

As they were leaving they saw death and desolation: “the peo-
ple, like potsherds, filled the city’s streets; in its lofty gates, where
they were wont to promenade, dead bodies were lying about; in its
boulevards, where the feasts were celebrated, scattered they lay; in

342

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

all of its streets, where they were wont to promenade, dead bodies
were lying about; in its places where the land’s festivities took
place, the people lay in heaps.” The dead were not brought to buri-
al: “the dead bodies, like fat placed in the sun, of themselves
melted away.”

Then did Ningal raise her great lamentation for Ur, the once-
majestic city, head city of Sumer, capital of an empire:

O house of Sin in Ur,
bitter is thy desolation . . .

O Ningal whose land has perished,
make thy heart like water!

The city has become a strange city,
how can one now exist?

The house has become a house of tears,
it makes my heart like water . . .

Ur and its temples

have been given over to the wind.

All of southern Mesopotamia lay prostrate, its soil and waters
left poisoned by the Evil Wind: “On the banks of the Tigris and
Euphrates, only sickly plants grew. ... In the swamps grow
sickly-headed reeds that rot in the stench. ... In the orchards and
gardens there is no new growth, quickly they waste away. . . .
The cultivated fields are not hoed, no seeds are implanted in the
soil, no songs resound in the fields.” In the countryside the ani-
mals were also affected: “On the steppe, cattle large and small
become scarce, all living creatures come to an end.” The domesti-
cated animals, too, were wiped out: “The sheepfolds have been
delivered to the wind. . . . The hum of the turning chum resounds
not in the sheepfold. . . . The stalls provide not fat and
cheese. . . . Ninurta has emptied Sumer of milk.”

“The storm crushed the land, wiped out everything; it roared
like a great wind over the land, none could escape it; desolating the
cities, desolating the houses. ... No one treads the highways, no
one seeks out the roads.”

The desolation of Sumer was complete.

EPILOGUE

Seven years after the Evil Wind had desolated Sumer, life began to stir
again in the land. But instead of an empire ruling others, Sumer itself
was now an occupied land, with a semblance of order maintained by
Elamite troops in the south and Gutian soldiers in the north.

Isin, a city never a capital before, was selected as a temporary
administrative center, and a former governor of Mari was brought
over to rule the land. Documents from that time recorded a com-
plaint that one “who is not of Sumerian seed” was given the reins
over Sumer. As his Semitic name — Ishbi-Erra — attested, he was a
follower of Nergal, and his appointment must have been part of the
arrangement between Nergal and Ninurta.

Some scholars call the decades that followed the demise of Ur a
Dark Age in Mesopotamian history. Little is known of those trying
times except for what is gleaned from the yearly date formulas. Im-
proving security, restoring here and there, Ishbi-Erra— seeking to
solidify his secular authority— dismissed the foreign garrison that
patrolled Ur and, by extending his reign to that city, laid claim to
being a successor to the kings of Ur; but only a tew other resettled
cities acknowledged his supremacy, and at Larsa a powerful local
chief posed, at times, a challenge.

A year or two later Ishbi-Erra sought to add the central religious au-
thority to his powers by assuming the guardianship of Nippur, raising
there the sacred emblems of Enlil and Ninurta. But the permission tor
that came from Ninurta alone, and the great gods of Nippur remained
aloof and alienated. Seeking other support, Ishbi-Erra appointed
priests and priestesses to restore the worship of Nannar, Ningal, and
Inanna. But it seems that the hearts of the people belonged elsewhere:
as numerous Shurpu (“Purification”) texts suggest, it was Enki and
Marduk— using Enki’s immense scientific knowledge (“magical
powers” in the eyes of the people)— who cured the afflicted, purified
the waters, and made the soil grow edible vegetation again.

For the next half-century, embracing the reign of two successors
of Ishbi-Erra at Isin, normalcy gradually returned to the land; agri-
culture and industry revived, internal and external trade resumed.

343

344

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

But it was only after the passage of seventy years since its
defilement— the same interval that later on applied to the dese-
crated temple in Jerusalem — that the temple of Nippur could be re-
built by the third successor on the throne of Isin, Ishme-Dagan. In
a long poem of twelve stanzas dedicated to Nippur, he described
how its divine couple responded to his appeals to restore the city
and its great temple, so that “Nippur’s brickwork be restored" and
“the divine tablets be returned to Nippur.”

There was great jubilation in the land when the great temple was
rededicated to Enlil and Ninlil, in the year 1953 b.c.; it was only
then that the cities of Sumer and Akkad were officially declared
habitable again.

The official return to normalcy, however, only served to stir up
old rivalries among the gods. The successor to Ishme-Dagan bore a
name indicating his allegiance to Ishtar. Ninurta put a quick end to
that, and the next ruler at Isin— the last one ever to bear a Sumerian
name— was one of his followers. But this claim of Ninurta to the
restored land could not be upheld: after all, he had caused, even if
indirectly, Sumer’s destruction. As the next successor’s name sug-
gests, Sin then sought to reassert his authority; but the days of his
and Ur’s supremacy were over.

And so, by the authority vested in them, Anu and Enlil finally
accepted Marduk’s claim to supremacy at Babylon. Commemorat-
ing the fateful decision in the preamble to his law code, the Babylo-
nian king Hammurabi put it in these words:

Lofty Anu, lord of the
gods who from Heaven came to Earth,
and Enlil, lord of Heaven and Earth
who determines the destinies of the land.

Determined for Marduk, the firstborn of Enki,
the Enlil-functions over all mankind;

Made him great among the gods who watch and see.

Called Babylon by name to be exalted,
made it supreme in the world;

And established for Marduk, in its midst,
an everlasting kingship.

Babylon, then Assyria, rose to greatness. Sumer was no more;
but in a distant land, the baton of its legacy passed from the hands
of Abraham and Isaac his son unto the hand of Jacob, the one re-
named Isra-El.

The Earth Chronicles: Time Chart

Years

Ago

450.000

445.000

430.000

41 $,000

400.000

380.000

I. Events Before the Deluge

On Nibiru, a distant member of our solar system, life
faces slow extinction as the planet’s atmosphere
erodes. Deposed by Anu, the ruler Alalu escapes in a
spaceship and finds refuge on Earth. He discovers that
Earth has gold that can be used to protect Nibiru's
atmosphere.

Led by Enki, a son of Anu, the Anunnaki land on
Earth, establish Eridu— Earth Station I— for extracting
gold from the waters of the Persian Gulf.

Earth's climate mellows. More Anunnaki arrive on
Earth, among them Enki’s half-sister Ninharsag,
Chief Medical Officer.

As gold production falters, Anu arrives on Earth with
Enlil, the heir apparent. It is decided to obtain the vital
gold by mining it in southern Africa. Drawing lots,
Enlil wins command of Earth Mission; Enki is rele-
gated to Africa. On departing Earth, Anu is chal-
lenged by Alalu’s grandson.

Seven functional settlements in southern Mesopo-
tamia include a Spaceport (Sippar). Mission Control
Center (Nippur), a metallurgical center (Badtibira), a
medical center (Shuruppak). The ores arrive by ships
from Africa; the refined metal is sent aloft to orbiters
manned by Igigi, then transferred to spaceships arriv-
ing periodically from Nibiru.

Gaining the support ot the Igigi, Alalu's grandson at-
tempts to seize mastery over Earth. The Enlilites win
the War of the Olden Gods.

345

34^ THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

300.000 The Anunnaki toiling in the gold mines mutiny. Enki
and Ninharsag create Primitive Workers through ge-
netic manipulation of Apewoman; they take over the
manual chores of the Anunnaki. Enlil raids the mines,
brings the Primitive Workers to the Edin in Mesopota-
mia. Given the ability to procreate. Homo sapiens be-
gins to multiply.

200.000 Life on Earth regresses during a new glacial period.

100.000 Climate warms again. The Anunnaki (the biblical
Nefilim), to Enlil’s growing annoyance, marry the
daughters of Man.

75.000 The “accursation of Earth”— a new Ice Age— begins.
Regressive types of Man roam the Earth. Cro-Magnon
man survives.

49.000 Enki and Ninharsag elevate humans of Anunnaki par-
entage to rule in Shuruppak. Enlil, enraged, plots
Mankind’s demise.

13.000 Realizing that the passage of Nibiru in Earth’s prox-
imity will trigger an immense tidal wave, Enlil makes
the Anunnaki swear to keep the impending calamity a
secret from Mankind.

B.C. II. Events After the Deluge

1 1 .000 Enki breaks the oath, instructs Ziusudra/Noah to build
a submersible ship. The Deluge sweeps over the
Earth; the Anunnaki witness the total destruction from
their orbiting spacecraft.

Enlil agrees to grant the remnants of Mankind imple-
ments and seeds; agriculture begins in the highlands.
Enki domesticates animals.

10,500 The descendants of Noah are allotted three regions.

Ninurta, Enlil’s foremost son, dams the mountains
and drains the rivers to make Mesopotamia habitable;
Enki reclaims the Nile valley. The Sinai peninsula is
retained by the Anunnaki for a post-Diluvial space-
port; a control center is established on Mount Moriah
(the future Jerusalem).

The Earth Chronicles: Time Chart 347

9780 Ra/Marduk, Enki’s firstborn son, divides dominion
over Egypt between Osiris and Seth.

9330 Seth seizes and dismembers Osiris, assumes sole rule
over the Nile Valley.

8970 Homs avenges his father Osiris by launching the First
Pyramid War. Seth escapes to Asia, seizes the Sinai
peninsula and Canaan.

8670 Opposed to the resulting control of all the space facili-
ties by Enki’s descendants, the Enlilites launch the
Second Pyramid War. The victorious Ninurta empties
the Great Pyramid of its equipment.

Ninharsag, half-sister of Enki and Enlil, convenes a
peace conference. The division of Earth is rcaffimied.
Rule over Egypt transferred from the Ra/Marduk dy-
nasty to that of Thoth. Heliopolis built as a substitute
Beacon City.

8500 The Anunnaki establish outposts at the gateway to the
space facilities; Jericho is one of them.

7400 As the era of peace continues, the Anunnaki grant
Mankind new advances; the Neolithic period begins.
Demigods rule over Egypt.

3800 Urban civilization begins in Sumer as the Anunnaki
reestablish there the Olden Cities, beginning with
Eridu and Nippur.

Anu comes to Earth for a pageantful visit. A new city,
Uruk (Erech), is built in his honor; he makes its temple
the abode of his beloved granddaughter Inanna/Ishtar.

B.C. III. Kingship on Earth

37$0 Mankind granted kingship. Kish is first capital under
the aegis of Ninurta. The calendar begun at Nippur.
Civilization blossoms out in Sumer (the First Region).

3450 Primacy in Sumer transferred to Nannar/Sin. Marduk
proclaims Babylon “Gateway of the Gods.” The
“Tower of Babel" incident. The Anunnaki confuse
Mankind’s languages.

348

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

His coup frustrated, Marduk/Ra returns to Egypt,
deposes Thoth, seizes his younger brother Dumuzi.
who had betrothed Inanna. Dumuzi accidentally killed;
Marduk imprisoned alive in the Great Pyramid. Freed
through an emergency shaft, he goes into exile.

3100 350 years of chaos end with installation of first Egyp-

tian Pharaoh in Memphis. Civilization comes to the
Second Region.

2900 Kingship in Sumer transferred to Erech. Inanna given
dominion over the Third Region; the Indus Valley civ-
ilization begins.

2650 Sumer’s royal capital shifts about. Kingship deterio-
rates. Enlil loses patience with the unruly human
multitudes.

2371 Inanna falls in love with Sharru-Kin (Sargon). He es-
tablishes new capital city, Agade (Akkad). Akkadian
empire launched.

231$ Aiming to rule the Four Regions, Sargon removes sa-
cred soil from Babylon. The Marduk-Inanna conflict
flares up again. It ends when Nergal, Marduk's
brother, journeys from south Africa to Babylon and
persuades Marduk to leave Mesopotamia.

2291 Naram-Sin ascends the throne of Akkad. Directed by
the warlike Inanna, he penetrates the Sinai peninsula,
invades Egypt.

2255 Inanna usurps the power in Mesopotamia; Naram-Sin
defiles Nippur. The Great Anunnaki obliterate Agade.
Inanna escapes. Sumer and Akkad occupied by for-
eign troops loyal to Enlil and Ninurta.

2220 Sumerian civilization rises to new heights under en-
lightened rulers of Lagash. Thoth helps its king Gudea
build a ziggurat-temple for Ninurta.

2193 Terah, Abraham’s father, born in Nippur into a
priestly-royal family.

2180 Egypt divided; followers of Ra/Marduk retain the
south; Pharaohs opposed to him gain the throne of
lower Egypt.

The Earth Chronicles: Time Chart

349

2130 As Enlil and Ninurta are increasingly away, central
authority also deteriorates in Mesopotamia. Inanna’s at-
tempt to regain the kingship for Erech does not last.

B.C. IV. The Fateful Century

2123 Abraham bom in Nippur.

2113 Enlil entrusts the Lands of Shem to Nannar; Ur de-
clared capital of new empire. Ur-Nammu ascends
throne, is named Protector of Nippur. A Nippurian
priest— Terah, Abraham’s father— comes to Ur to liai-
son with its royal court.

2096 Ur-Nammu dies in battle. The people consider his un-
timely death a betrayal by Anu and Enlil. Terah
departs with his family for Harran.

2095 Shulgi ascends the throne of Ur, strengthens imperial
ties. As empire thrives, Shulgi falls under charms of
Inanna, becomes her lover. Grants Larsa to Elamites
in exchange for serving as his Foreign Legion.

2080 Theban princes loyal to Ra/Marduk press northward
under Mentuhotep I. Nabu, Marduk’s son, gains ad-
herents for his father in Western Asia.

2055 On Nannar’s orders, Shulgi sends Elamite troops to
suppress unrest in Canaanite cities. Elamites reach the
gateway to the Sinai peninsula and its Spaceport.

2048 Shulgi dies. Marduk moves to the Land of the Hittites.
Abraham ordered to southern Canaan with an elite
corps of cavalrymen.

2047 Amar-Sin (the biblical Amraphel) becomes king of
Ur. Abraham goes to Egypt, stays five years, then re-
turns with more troops.

2041 Guided by Inanna, Amar-Sin forms a coalition of
Kings of the East, launches military expedition to Ca-
naan and the Sinai. Its leader is the Elamite Khedor-
la'omer. Abraham blocks the advance at the gateway
to the Spaceport.

350

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

2038 Shu-Sin replaces Amar-Sin on throne of Ur as the em-
pire disintegrates.

2029 Ibbi-Sin replaces Shu-Sin. The western provinces tilt
increasingly to Marduk.

2024 Leading his followers, Marduk marches on Sumer,
enthrones himself in Babylon. Fighting spreads to
central Mesopotamia. Nippur’s Holy of Holies is
defiled. Enlil demands punishment for Marduk and
Nabu; Enki opposes, but his son Nergal sides with En-
lil.

As Nabu marshals his Canaanite followers to capture
the Spaceport, the Great Anunnaki approve the use
of nuclear weapons. Nergal and Ninurta destroy the
Spaceport and the errant Canaanite cities.

2023 The winds carry the radioactive cloud to Sumer. Peo-
ple die a terrible death, animals perish, the water is
poisoned, the soil becomes barren. Sumer and its great
civilization lie prostrate. Its legacy passes to Abra-
ham’s seed as he begets — at age 100— a legitimate
heir: Isaac.

Sources

In addition to specific references in the text, the following served
as principal sources for The Wars of Gods and Men:

I. Studies, articles, and reports in various issues of the
following periodicals and scholarly series:

Abhandlungen der Deutschen (Preussichen) Akademie der Wissen-
schaften zu Berlin (Berlin)

Abhandlungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft (Berlin)
Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Philo. -hist klasse (Heidelberg)

Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes (Leipzig)

Acta Orientalia (Oslo)

Acta Societatis Scientarium Fennica (Helsinki)

Aegyptologische Forschungen (Hamburg-New York)

Der Alte Orient (Leipzig)

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Wilcke, C. Das Lugalbanda Epos. 1969.

. Sumerische literarische Texte. 1973.

Wilson, J.V.K. and Vanstiphout, H. The Rebel Lands. 1979.
Wilson, R.R. Genealogy and History in the Biblical World.
1977.

Winckler, H. Altorientalische Eorschungen. 1897-1906.

. Altorientalische Geschichts-Auffassung. 1906.

. Sammlung von Keilschrifttexten. 1893-95.

Wiseman, D.J. Chronicles of Chaldean Kings. 1956.

Witzel, M. Keilinschriftliche Studien. 1918-25.

Sources

365

. Tammuz-Liturgien line l Verwandtes. 1935.

Woolley, C.L. Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Ori-
gins. 1936.

. Excavations at Ur. 1923.

. Ur of the Chaldees. 1930.

. The Ziggurat and Its Surroundings. 1939.

Zimmem, H. Sumerische Kultlieder aus altbabylonischer Zeit.
1912-13.

. Zum Babylonischen Neujahrfest. 1918.

Index

Abel, 108, 111-114, 119
Abraham, 81, 218, 281-315, 321,
325, 327, 332, 344
Abu, 154
Abu-Simbel, 70
Abydos, 33

Abzu, see Lower World
Achaeans, 2-4
Achilles, 3
Adab, 245, 249, 274
Adad, 13, 14, 74, 91, 94, 98, 101,
115, 116, 123, 125, 160. 166,
174, 178, 184, 243, 258
Adam, 39, 107-115, 122
Adam, The, see Earthling
Adapa, 1 1 1
Adityas, 61 , 65, 66
Admah, 281, 305
Aegean Sea, 4
Aegipan, 58, 59
Aerial battles, 57, 58, 63, 65,
92-94

Aerial Chariots, 45, 57-69, 70, 78,
92, 93, 97, 1 18, 159, 190, 237.

See also Divine Bird, Whirlbirds
Africa, 80, 1 17, 126 128, 129,
130, 140, 155 o8, 162, 176,
178, 185, 229-231, 251, 254,
257-260, 326, 339, 340
Agade, 10, 76, 246, 248-250, 294.

See also Akkad
Agni, 61 , 65, 66
Agriculture, 1 19-126, 263, 270
Ahur-Mazda, 21

Akkad (Akkadian), 10-14, 21, 38,
71-73, 75, 76, 101, 140, 158,
173, 197, 246-250. 254-261,
265, 269, 272, 293-295, 344
Akko, 15
Aksak, 245, 249

Alalu, 83-85, 91, 92, 97
Albright. W. F., 315
Alexander, 22, 23
Alexandria, 33
Al-Mamoon, 202-205, 228
Amalekites, 300

Amar-Pal, see Amar-Sin 303, 304.

See also Amraphel
Amar-Sin, 280, 286, 298,
303-309, 317

Amen (Amon), 6-10, 228, 302
Amenophis, 289
American Oriental Society, 313
Amon (Amon-Ra), see Amen
Amorites (Amurru), 280. 291 , 292,
318, 322, 334

Amosis (Ahmosis), 288, 289
Amraphel, 281-286, 302, 303
Angels, 17, 19, 115, 191 ,
310-313, 340
Anshan, 20, 235, 338
Antarctica, 1 10, 117, 118
Antu, 73, 81. 82, 193-196
Anu, 10, 13, 14, 73, 74. 79-92,
97-104. 1 15, 120. 121, 131.
135, 143, 145, 158. 162, 165,
166, 174, 193-196. 223, 231,
235-237. 241. 243, 249,
252-255. 259, 272, 278, 279,
291, 322, 325-327, 333,
337-339, 343, 344
Anunnaki, 78-90, 94-108,

1 16-125, 130, 131, 133-135,
142, 153, 154, 173-178, 184,
185, 190-196, 218, 226, 229,
231-233, 251-255, 302, 327,
330

Apewoman, 103-105
Aphrodite, 51
Apollo, 3, 33

Index

367

Aqhat, 314
Arabia, 19, 185
Aram (Aramaic), 17, 129, 288
Ararat, Mount, 18, 88, 89, 118,
133, 135
Aratta, 233-236
Arinna, 71. 73
Ariokh, 281-283. 307
Ark of the Covenant, 191, 296, 300
Arman, 258
Arpakhshad, 129, 294
Aryans, 60, 73
Asar (Ashar), 127, 159, 165
Ashdod, 15, 16
Ashkelon, 15
Ashterot-Kamayim, 305
Ashtoreth, see Ishtar
Ashur (city), 19, 127, 129, 224.
280

Ashur (deity), 13-18.64, 111,

1 14, 127

Ashurbanipal, 18, 111. 198,298,
325

Ashvins, 62

Asia (Asiatics), 5, 46, 59, 125,
133, 156-161, 251, 257, 287,
290, 295

Asia Minor, 4, 21, 22, 125, 129,
298, 322

Assembly of the Gods. 44-46, 94,
101, 104, 1 15, 118, 130, 156,
166, 173-179, 193-197, 220,
259, 325-327

Assyria (Assyrians), 1, 13-19,
74-76, 111, 112, 224, 283,
344

Astour, M, C., 283
Astronauts, see Anunnaki, Igigi
Astronomy, 109. 110, 150, 295,
297, 298
Asuras, 64, 65
Aswan, 28, 30, 37, 70, 220
Atra-Hasis, 85, 102-104, 1 18
Avenger god, 44, 67, 70, 93, 155
Awan, 245

Azag. 159, 162, 163, 222, 223
Azimua, 155

Baalbek. 122, 134, 135, 158, 178,
181, 182

Babylon (Babylonia), 12-14,

19-21, 74-76, 1 12, 1 15, 127,
128, 197-199, 216, 221. 225,
246, 250, 251-254, 259, 269,
274, 280, 283-285, 292, 294,
298-302, 306, 321-326, 338,
340, 344
Bad-Tibira, 87

Barton, George A., 163, 173,

178

Bau. 226, 262, 341
Beer- Sheba, 307
Bela, 281, 305
Ben-Ben, 38
Bennu Bird, 39
Bera, 281

Bergmann, E., 177

Berlin Museum, 224

Berossus, 1 19, 198. 297, 298

Bcth-EI, 186, 300, 302

Bethleham, 186

Beth-Shemesh, see Baalbek

Bible (biblical), see Old Testament

Birch, Samuel, 36

Birsha, 281

Black Sea, 129

Blake, I.M., 315

Boat of Heaven, 236, 240.

See also Aerial Chariots
Boghazkoi, 70
Bohl, Franz, 303
Bollenriicher, J., 163
Book of Chronicles, 286
Book of the Dead, 39, 42, 138
Book of Enoch, 115
Book of Exodus, 7, 287-289
Book of Jubilees, 112, 157,302
Book of Kings, 16, 17,286
Borsippa, 14, 224. 225. 299, 307,
324

Boscawen, W.S.C., 198
Brilliance. Divine, 16, 18, 19, 74,
95, 97, 98, 159-164, 182,
254, 323.

See also Weapons. Divine

368

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

British Museum, 36, 112, 282,

283, 285

Brugsch, Heinrich, 28
Budge, E.A. Wallis, 31. 32
Bull of Heaven, 175, 192, 244
Buren, E. D, van, 268
Byblos, 15, 42

Cagni. L., 325
Cain, 108, 111-114, 119
Calendar, 296
Cambyses. 21

Canaan (Canaanites), 5, 9, 21,

129, 130, 156-158, 178, 182,
190, 191, 256, 277, 279,
281-308, 314, 315

Casius, Mount, 58, 59
Caspian Sea, 60, 129
Castration, 5 1 , 58, 85
Cedar Land, 5, 19
Cedar Mountain, 11,74, 121-125,

130, 134, 244. 249, 255, 258
Celestial Abode, 64, 92. 1 15
Celestial Barge/Boat, 26, 27, 38,

43, 45, 92-98, 118. 122, 150.
See also Aerial Chariots
Celestial Charts, 88, 95.

See also Tablets of Destinies
Celestial Disc, see Winged Disc
Chaldea (Chaldeans), 14, 20
Chariot of Fire, see Whirlbird
Chemical Warfare, 162
Cheops, 135, 136, 148-152.

206

Chephren, 135, 136, 150
Cherubim, 296
Chester Beatty papyrus, 44
Chiera, E., 1 16

Children of Israel, see Israelites
Cities, Olden, 76, 87, 88,

192-194, 196

City of Datepalms, see Jericho
Confusion of Languages, 197, 198,
246

Creation Tales, 102-105, 109,

1 10. 120-124
Crete, 9, 52

Cronus, 50-52, 54. 86
Cross, Sign of, 77, 233
Cubits, 213
Cush, 157

Cyclopes, 50, 53, 56
Cyprus, 51
Cyrus, 20, 21

Damascus, 302, 308. 317
Damkina, 73. 82
Dan, 190
Darius, 20, 24

Date Formulas, 304, 307, 318
Daughters of Man, 116, 117
Dead Sea, 1, 183, 186, 305. 313,
315, 329

Dead Sea Scrolls, 1 . 2, 54
Deimel, Anton.

Deluge, 88, 116-119, 121-123.
125, 126, 129, 130, 153. 156,
178. 246, 252, 253, 280
Demeter, 52

Demigods, 35, 191. 192,235,243,
244. 272-274, 278
Demons. 64-68, 94. 95, 101
Dendera, 30
Der, 249

Deuteronomy, 230, 325
Dhorme, P., 165
Dijk, J. Van, 235
Divine Bird, 159, 160, 171,243,
262, 266-269.

See also Whirlbird
Divine Food, 53, 64, 67
Divine Formulas, 88, 95-97, 193,
194, 239-242

Domestication, 119-121, 124, 125
Drehem, 320

Dumuzi, 81, 127, 176, 216-223,
229-231, 244

Dur-Mah-llani, 277, 279, 305-307
Dutt, R., 62
Dyaus-Pitar, 60, 63

Ea, see Enki

Eanna. 195, 235, 237, 260
Eannatum, 264

Index

369

Earth Mission, 77-90
Earthling, 91, 104-108, 110, 111.
116, 117

Eber, 129, 294, 295
Ebla, 11, 249, 258
Eden (Ed in) 108, 111, 115, 120,
125, 174

Edfu, 25-32, 45, 153, 216
Edgar, John and Morton, 207,

209
Edom, I

Edwards Air Force Base, 331
Egypt (Egyptians), 1, 5-10, 15,
18-23, 25-48, 49, 59, 70-73,
75, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131,
135-137, 145-151, 153-171,
173, 176-179, 184, 190, 192,
216, 220, 221, 228, 232, 249,
251, 257-259, 267, 286-293,
300-304, 315, 338
Ein-Mishpat, see Kadesh-Bamea
Eissfeldt, Otto, 59
Ekron, 16

Ekur, 99, 140-148, 158, 163, 192,
223, 259. 261, 272, 276, 323
El, 191, 196

Elam (Elamites), 11,20,21, 125,
129, 248, 249, 254, 257, 258,
279, 280-285, 304, 306, 323,
334, 343

el-Arish, 133, 300
El-Paran, 305
el-Tor, 182

Elephantine (Island), 37, 70
Elijah, 190
Elisha, 315
Ellasar, see Larsa
Emery, Walter, B.. 28
Enbilulu. 220, 221
Eninnu, 266

Enki, 73, 76-90, 91-107,

1 1 1-127, 130, 131, 135. 149.
153-155, 162-167, 174-176.
191-194, 216, 217, 229-231,
239-241, 254, 259, 266, 280,
318, 326, 327, 339, 340, 343
Enlil, 10, 11, 13, 73, 74, 80-90,

91-108, 1 15-125, 130, 131,
135, 140, 145, 154, 158, 159,
163-167, 173-180, 192,
216-218, 229, 243-246,
249-255, 259-264, 269-279,
291, 318, 319, 323, 324,
327-330, 337, 339, 341-344
Enlilship, 97-99, 101, 102
Enmeduranki, 115
Enmerkar, 233-239, 243, 244, 262
Enoch, 111-115
Enosh, 1 14- 1 16
Enshag, 155, 156
Enzu, see Sin (deity)

Epic of Creation, 110
Erech, 76, 196, 197, 199,

235-245. 248, 252, 269, 272.
320, 335, 339

Ereshkigal, 117, 126, 145, 176,
177, 229-231

Eridu, 77, 85, 87, I 14, 178,

192-194, 241, 242, 280, 335,
338, 340
Erra, see Nergal
Esagil. 199, 252, 254, 322
Esarhaddon, 18, 74, 111
Essenes, 1 , 25
Etana, 308

Ethiopia (Ethiopians), 32, 41 , 126,
129

Euphrates River, 73, 78, 89, 123,
130, 133, 174, 231, 249, 288,
323, 342

Eve, 39, 107-114
Evolution, 105, 110
Excalibur, Legend of, 269
Exodus, 6, 7, 133, 190, 286, 287,
296

Ezekiel, 2
Ezida, 324, 325

Falcon god, see Horus, Ra
Falkenstein, A., 193
Fiery pillar, 7, 45
Flavius, Josephus, 33, 287, 297, 302
Flood, the Great, see Deluge
Food of Life, 23 1

370

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Gadd, C. J., 320
Gaea, 50, 5 1 , 55
Garden of Eden, 107, 108
Garstang, J., 287
Garuda, 63

Gateway of the gods, see Babylon
Gaza, 16, 307

Geb, 35, 36, 39-41, 46. 150, 153,

155, 167

Geller, Samuel, 158

Genesis, Book of, 109-119, 129,

156, 197, 281, 289, 291,
303-306, 310-314

Genetic Engineering, 104, 105,
110, 119-121
Gerar, 315

Geshtinanna, 217-220

Gibil, 126, 174, 216, 217, 326, 327

Gilead, 190

Gilgamesh, 244, 245, 277, 305,
338

Girsu, see Lagash
Giza, 128, 135-151, 153, 155,
163-172, 175-177, 182,
202-215, 221, 267
God Lists, 82, 83, 176
God of Magic, 149, 266.

See also Thoth
Gossmann, P. F., 325
Gold, 78-80, 83-85, 87, 95, 102,
103, 111, 126, 185, 192
Gomorrah, 281, 283, 302, 305,
308-315, 324, 329, 336
Great Sea, see Mediterranean
Greece (Greeks), 2-4, 9, 21, 22,
40, 49, 70, 76, 86, 95, 268,
303, 315

Griffith, R.T., 66
Gudea, 266-268
Giiterbock, H., 91
Gula, see Bau
Gulf of Eilat, 185
Gutium (Gutians), 11, 262, 266,
269, 270, 343

Habiru (Hapiru), 292, 295
Hades, 52, 57, 69

Hagar, 81

Haigh, D.H., 303

Hallo, W. William, 96, 1 14

Ham (Hamitic), 129, 130, 156-158

Ham (city), 305, 322

Hamath, 157, 322

Hamazi, 245

Hammurabi, 12, 13, 74, 283-286,
344

Hanuman, 63
Harappa, 232, 233
Harland, P., 315
Harran, 290, 293, 296
Hamm (city), 185, 191. 290, 291,
295, 297, 298, 300. 301, 304.
318, 321

Harsag, 132-135, 148, 158, 162,
173, 174, 182, 268.

See also St. Katherine, Mount
Hathor, 145, 148
Hatshepsut, 288
Hatti Land, see Hittites
Hattushilish, 70, 7 I
Haupt, Paul, 313
Hebat, 73, 94

Hebrew (language), 17, 80, 107,
114, 115, 183, 196, 199, 281.
282

Hebrews. 230, 288-298, 302
Hebron, 186, 191, 302, 308, 310,
315

Heliopolis (Egyptian), 20, 38, 151,
182. 216, 258. 288
Heliopolis (Lebanese), see Baalbek
Hera, 52, 59
Heracles, 59
Heraclepolis, 268
Herbert, J., 66
Hermes, 41 , 58, 59
Herodotus, 32-36, 49, 58, 59
Hesiod, 49, 56, 59
Hestia, 52
Hezekiah, 16, 17

Hindu Tales/Texts, 60-69, 70, 73,
78, 95

Hiroshima, 315, 336

Hittites, 4, 5,8,21,70-75,83-86,

Index

371

91, 94, 95, 283, 297, 298,
301, 321

Holy of Holies, 88, 95, 97, 251,
261, 296, 323
Homer, 2, 49

Homs, 25-36. 42-48, 145, 148,
153-156, 164, 166, 216, 217,
268

Hrozny, F., 162
Humans, 73, 74, 91, 300
Hyksos, 287, 288

Ibbi-Sin, 280, 298, 317, 320, 321,
334, 335

Ice Age, 116, 118
Id, 80

Iddin-Dagan, 242
Igigi, 86, 87,91-99, 118, 196,327
Iliad, 2-4, 49, 63
Imdugud, see Divine Bird
Immortality, Immortals, 25, 52,
64, 67, 111, 115, 153, 244,
338

Imperial Ottoman Museum, 283. 285
Inanna, see Ishtar
India, 22, 59, 232, 233
Indo-European, 4, 20, 59, 130
Indra, 61, 65-69, 73, 94, 95, 237
Indus River Civilization, 130,
232-237

Indus River Valley, 232-236
Iran, see Persia
Iron, Divine, 25-31
Irsirra gods, see Igigi
Isaac, 289, 315, 344
Isaiah, 17, 19
Isin, 12, 339, 343, 344
Isis, 39-48, 148
Israel, see Jacob
Israel (country), 1 19
Israelites, 6, 7, 38, 185, 286-289,
296

Ishbi-Erra, 343
Ishkur, see Adad, Teshub
Ishme-Dagan, 344
Ishtar, 5, 10, 11, 18. 19, 28, 73,
74, 81, 101, 118, 125, 154,

161, 165, 179, 188, 216-223,
229-264, 269-272, 276, 279,
299, 317, 320, 327, 339, 343,
344

Ishum, see Ninurta

Jack, J.W., 288
Jacob, 191, 289, 344
Jacobsen, Thorkild, 244, 335
Japhet, 129, 130
Jeremiah, 19

Jeremias, Alfred, 283, 292, 293
Jericho, 183-185, 255, 287
Jerusalem, 1, 16-20, 130,

156-158, 175, 180, 185, 186,
191, 213, 255, 286, 287, 300,
309, 334, 344
Jesus, 224

Jordan River, 157, 185-191.255,
302, 305, 325
Joseph, 287, 289
Josephus, see Flavius
Joshua, 183, 191, 315
Judaea (Judea), 1, 16, 17, 186,

190, 302

Jupiter (deity), 2, 3, 60
Jupiter (planet), 77, 78, 109, 195

Kadesh, 8, 9, 71

Kadesh-Bamea, 300, 305, 306, 317
Kamak, 70, 71
Kasyapa, 60, 69
Kenyon, K.M., 287
Khedorla’omer, 281-285, 303-307
Khedorlaomer Texts, 281-283,
306, 307, 322, 323, 330
Khufu, see Cheops
King Lists, 33, 85, 114, 115, 197,
235, 237, 262
King, L. W., 109, 285
King's Highway, 185, 305, 329
Kingship, 83,91.93,94, 196, 197,
199, 232, 235-250, 253, 254,
258, 259, 269, 272, 286, 293,
317, 341, 344

Kish, 196, 197, 199, 245, 246,
264, 269, 308

372

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Koeppel, R., 186

Kramer, Samuel N., 105, 121,

221, 235, 240
Kudur-Laghamar, 282-284
Kumarbi, 70, 85, 86, 91-95, 98, 131
Kummiya, 93, 94
Kush, see Nubia
Kutha, 73. 254, 258

Lagash, 12, 76, 248, 249,

262-266, 268, 272, 274, 341
Lake of Reeds, 142
Lama, 92

Lambert, Maurice, 264
Lambert, W.G., 112, 115
Lamech, 1 1 1
Lamentations, 334-342
Land of Mines, 103-106, 229
Land of Missiles, 131
Land of Seth, 3 1
Landing Corridor/Path, 88, 89,

133, 134, 152, 181, 182
Landing Place/Platform, 122, 126,
130, 134, 158, 178, 181, 182,
244, 255

Langdon, Stephen, 224
Larark, 87

Larsa, 12, 87, 274, 279, 281-286,
344

Lebanon, 5, 13, 14, 42, 122, 156,
157, 178, 244, 277, 288.

See also Cedar Land
Leonardo da Vinci, 159
Lenormant, F., 303
Libya, 129
Lillit, 101

Lot, 302, 309, 312-315, 340
Lovemaking, 41, 44, 53, 62, 64,
69, 81, 82, 116, 117,
154-156, 217-219, 242-244,
247, 248, 279, 314
Lower Sea, see Persian Gulf
Lower World, 57, 80-87, 92-95,
102-108, 117, 125-127, 140,
160-162, 174, 177, 192, 193,
196, 229-231, 240, 241, 253,
280, 318, 327

Lugalbanda, 243, 244, 320
Lugal-zagesi, 246, 262

Macedonia, 22
Magan, see Egypt
Malkizedek, 309
Mallon, Alexis, 185, 186. 315
Mammi, see Ninharsag
Man, Creation of, 104, 105, 131
Manetho, 33-44, 126, 153, 177,
184, 191, 232, 287, 289
Mankind, 100-109. 110, 116-126,
129, 130, 157, 174, 175, 178,
192, 196, 198, 228, 245, 254,
272, 276, 290
Mahabharata, 60, 62, 65
Marathon, 22

Marduk (deity), 12, 14, 19-21,78,
79, 101, 127, 128, 149, 153,
159, 167, 197-199, 215-232,
250-254, 259, 262, 269. 270,
274, 280, 298, 299, 302,
304-309, 318, 321-328, 340.
343, 344

Marduk (planet), see Nibiru
Mari, 245, 248, 249, 322, 343
Mars (deity), 3

Mars (planet), 76, 79, 83, 1 10, 195
Martu, 116, 117
Maruts, 67
Mattiwaza, 73

Mediterranean Sea, 9, 10, 15, 22,
30, 42, 58, 129, 131, 183,
185, 249, 255, 257, 258, 290,
324, 325, 334, 338
Media, 20, 21
Megiddo, 5
Meluhha, see Ethiopia
Mellaart, James, 183
Memphis, 21, 32, 36, 46, 155,
258, 268

Menes, 32-36, 126, 137, 232
Menkara, see Mycerinus
Mentuhotep II, 309
Mercer, Samuel B.. 45
Mercury (planet), 195
Meslam, 162, 174

Index

373

Mesopotamia, 8, 10-12, 21, 38,
75-80, 87, 95, 105, 109-119,
123-127, 131, 140-142,
154-156, 174. 184, 186, 192,
216, 231, 233, 246, 252-258,
261-269, 279, 280, 286, 290,
291, 304, 305, 307, 318,
321-344

Metal People, 28, 31
Mettemich stela, 42
Milkha, 293
Millard, A.R.. 1 1,-2
Minerva, 3

Mission Control Center, 87, 88,
95, 130, 156, 171, 175, 180,
182-185, 192, 255, 295, 300,
302

Mitanni, 73
Mitra, 61, 73
Mizra’im, see Egypt
Moab (Moabites), 1, 190, 304
Moab, Mount, 186
Mohenjo-Daro, 232, 233
Mojave Desert, 331
Moon, 77, 79, 83, 1 10, 183, 195,
296, 300, 320
Moran, W.L., 96
Moriah, Mount, 156, 158, 181, 182
Moses, 190, 247, 288, 289
Mound, Holy/Pure, 120, 124, 198
Mount Most Supreme, 328, 329, 338
Muller, W. Max, 46
Muir, J., 67
Muses, 50, 56
Muwatalis, 8, 9
Mycerinus, 135, 136

Nabu, 224, 225, 299, 304, 306,
318, 323-328
Nabunaid, 20, 21
Nagasaki, 315, 336
Nahor, 290-294, 296, 298
Nakhl, 305

Nanna (Nannar), see Sin
Nanshe, 339

Naram-Sin, 11, 12,74, 173,
254-266, 270

Narmer, 36

National Aeronautics & Space
Administration. 109, 110, 333
National Geographic Society, 189
Navel of the Earth, 128, 180, 181,
295

Nazi, 155

Nebo, Mount, 186, 190
Nebuchadnezzar, 19, 20
Necho. 19

Nefilim, 1 15, 1 16. 191 .

See also Anunnaki
Negev, 277, 300-303, 307
Nephtys, 39, 40

Nergal, 11, 14, 73, 74, 1 17, 126,
163-165, 167, 174, 176, 196,

216, 217, 229-231, 251-254,
258-260, 262, 309, 323-343

Neuville, R., 186
New Testament, 224, 289
Newton, Isaac, 213
Nibiru, 77-89, 91-1 10, 1 17, 1 18,
121, 131, 155, 180, 192, 195,
229, 233
Nidaba, 236

Nile River, 30, 37, 38, 42, 126,
127, 130, 142, 220
Nimrod, 197
Ninab, 1 16, 1 17
Ninagal, 126
Ninazu, 154
Nindara, 155

Nineveh, 18, 19, 74. 198, 224, 325
Ningal, 179, 217, 261, 341-344
Ningishzidda, 176, 177, 266-268
Ninharsag, 133, 140-148,

153-167, 173-180, 190, 193,

217, 241, 274, 277, 339.

See also Sud

Ninib, see Ninurta
Ninkashi, 155
Ninki, 82, 339, 340.

See also Damkina
Ninlil, 73, 82, 140, 179, 192, 272,
277, 318, 319, 343, 344
Ninmah, see Ninharsag
Ninsun, 244, 272, 274

374

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

Ninsutu, 154
Nintu, 155
Nintulla, 154

Ninurta, 13, 73, 74, 94-104,

121-125, 132, 133, 149, 154,
158-172, 174-179, 182, 184,
196, 221, 225, 245, 246, 249,
259-270, 274, 277, 309, 319,
323-344

Nippur, 12, 81, 88. 91-99, 115,
121, 133, 140, 157, 163. 173,
174, 180, 192-194, 249, 251,
259-263, 291, 295-297. 304.
318-320, 323, 335, 338, 339,
343, 344
Nisroch, 18

Noah, 116, 118, 119, 123, 129,
157, 213

Nubia, 28, 45, 126, 129
Nuclear Explosions, 54-58.

313-317, 324-342
Nudimmud, see Enki
Nunamnir, see Enlil
Nungal, 237
Nusku, 226
Nut, 39-41

Obelisks, 20

Old Testament, 5-8, 16-19, 81,
107, 110-116, 119, 129, 130,
156, 190, 191, 197, 230, 255,
276, 277, 281, 286-295,
300-315, 325, 327, 334
Olympians, 54-59
Olympus, Mount, 4, 49-54, 58
Omens, see Oracles
On, see Heliopolis
Oracles, 23, 94, 174, 244, 253,
279, 296, 304, 321, 322
Orbital Platforms, 86, 87, 96
Orbiters, 87, 92, 96, 118, 143.

See also Igigi
Orontes River, 59
Osiris, 31, 35-48, 64, 127, 148,
155, 268

Othyres, Mount, 52-54
Otten, H., 91

Palermo Stone, 35
Pantheon of Twelve, 61 , 131,229,
241

Papyrus of Hunefer, 46
Patriarchs, 81, 114,281,286-290,
298, 302

Peace treaties, 71-73, 173-177
Peet, T.E., 288
Peleg, 294, 295
Peoples of the Sea, 9
Pepi I, 5

Persia (Persians), 20, 21, 235
Persian Gulf, 10, 78, 129, 133,
249, 313

Petrie, Flinders, 36
Philistia (Philistines), 1,9, 16,21,
59, 279

Phoenicia, 16, 21, 59
Phoenix, 39
Pi (7r), 211. 213
Pi-Ankhy, 6

Pinches, Theophilus, 282-284
Pindar, 49, 56
Pi-Tom (Pithom), 38, 288
Planet of Crossing, see Nibiru
Planet of Millions of Years, 38
Plutarch, 40, 41 , 45
Pluto, 109, 1 10

Pontifical Biblical Institute, 185, 315
Poseidon, 52, 69

Primitive Workers, 103-107, 117,
120

Priests (Priesthood), 114-117,

191, 195, 225, 235, 244, 278,
286, 295-297, 307-309,
319-321, 343

Ptah, 35-38, 46-48, 71, 126-128,
149-151, 153-156. 177
Pushan, 61 , 237

Pyramids, 128, 135-152, 155-172,
173-177, 182, 202-215,
221-228, 267

Pyramid Texts, 39, 42, 338
Pyramid War, First, 25-48, 128.

152, 155-158, 216
Pyramid War, Second, 128, 152.
158-178, 217, 220, 259, 267

Index

375

Ra, 5, 6, 22, 25-44, 71, 72,
126-128, 149, 150, 153, 155,
167, 228. 251, 302
Rabat-Amon, 307
Rama, 63
Ramayana, 60, 63
Rameses (city), 288
Ramses II. 8, 9, 32, 36, 70, 71
Ramses III, 9

Ranks, Divine, 74, 81, 101, 199,
267

Red Sea, 30, 38, 142, 157, 182,
184, 185

Regions, The Four, 65, 130, 131,
156-158, 180, 232, 251,
256-259, 279, 320
Restricted Zone, see Spaceport
Resurrection, 45, 224-231
Rhea, 41, 50, 52
Rim-Sin, 13

Rocketships, 74-77, 1 18, 145, 338
Romeo and Juliet. 216, 217
Rudra, 61 . 62

Rutherford, Adam, 209, 227

Sacred Marriage. 242, 243
Sacred Mount, 243
St. Katherine, Mount, 133, 135,
158, 182
Salamis, 22
Sallier papyrus, 45
Samaria, 254
Sanskrit Texts, 59-69, 94
Sarah, 81,218, 290-293, 302, 310
Sargon of Agade. 10, 11, 73, 76,
177. 246-256, 263-265, 269,
270, 293, 294
Sargon (of Assyria), I I I
Sarpanit, 224-226
Saturn, 109, 195
Sayce, A.H., 282
Scheil, Vincent, 283
Schliemann, Heinrich, 4
Schneider, Nikolaus, 293
Scorpion god. see Nergal
Secrets, Divine, 115, 151, 266
Se'ir, Mount, 305

Semites (Semitic), 38, 291-293, 343
Sennacherib, 14-18, 111
Septuagint, 303

Serpent emblem, 142, 176, 221, 268
Serpent God, 37, 56, 57, 107, 108,
159, 176, 221, 222
Seth, 39, 1 14

Seth (deity), 31-48, 71, 155-158,
217

Sexual Code, 80-83, 217-219
Shalem, see Jerusalem
Shalmaneser III. 14, 74
Shamash, 72, 81, 93. 1 15, 125,
154, 164, 179, 180, 182, 196,
217, 225, 235.

See also Utu 246, 254, 262, 279.
323, 327
Shara, 244, 320
Shaveh-Kiryatayim, 305
Shechem, 300
Shelach, 294

Shem, 38, 129, 130, 143, 156,
157, 254, 290, 291. 293
Shem-Eber, 281
Shinab, 28 1
Shin'ar, see Sumer
Ships. 80. 118, 119
Shoes, Swift, 92, 94
Shu, 35, 39, 46, 150
Shulgi, 277-280, 285, 286, 291,
297-299, 304, 305
Shulim, see Jerusalem
Shupilulima, 73
Shuruppak, 87, 1 16
Shu-Sin, 280, 298. 317-320
Shuttlecraft. 86. 87. 95, 96, 118,
122, 140, 331
Sidon, 15

Sin (deity), I 1, 21, 73, 74, 101,
125. 154, 165. 174, 179. 180,
183, 196, 197, 199, 217, 225,
229, 246, 249, 254-256. 261,
270. 276-280. 282, 290, 291.
299, 303, 306. 309, 317, 320,
321, 327, 341-344
Sin-Idinna, 284, 285
Sinai, Mount, 133

THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN

37 *

Sinai peninsula, 15, 21, 31, 59,
130-162, 173, 175, 180,
182-185, 191, 249, 257, 258,
263, 277, 300, 302-305, 308,
309, 315, 317, 331-335
Sippar, 87-89, 95. 115, 118, 122,
140

Sjdberg, Ake, 177

Sky Chambers, 130, 143, 145, 236.

See also Aerial Chariots
Smith, George, 109, 198
Snake god, see Serpent god,

Society of Biblical Archaeology,
198, 282

Sodom, 19, 281, 283, 302, 305, 308,
309-315, 324, 327, 329, 336
Sodom, Mount, 186
Solar System. 77, 78, 83, 100, 109,

1 10

Solomon, 286, 300

Spacecraft, Unmanned. 83, 109, 332

Spaceport, 88, 95, 115, 118,

130-157, 175, 180, 181, 184,
196, 256, 257, 300, 302, 305,
306-309, 317, 330-333, 338
Spaceships, 43, 77-79, 85, 95, 109
Space Flight, 63, 77-90, 95, 96,

1 15, 231, 237
Space Stations, see Orbital
Platforms

Spartoli Tablets, 282, 303
Sphinx, 59, 135-151, 268
Star of David, 180
Stone Ages, 130, 183, 185, 192
Stone god, 93, 94
Stones, Radiating, 164, 167-169,
253, 267

Storm Bird, 159, 160
Storm god, 4, 5, 65, 66, 72, 92-94
Storm Wind, 27, 56
Succession Rules, 40, 41, 67, 81,
217, 218, 230

Sud, 82, 87, 95, 97, 104-108, 118,
120, 131, 133.

See also Ninharsag
Sudan, 127
Sultan-Tepe, 98

Sumer (Sumerians). 12-14,21.
75-79, 115, 124, 130, 140,
142, 174, 176, 178, 183,
192-199, 231, 233, 236-249,
251-280, 281. 283, 286,
290-295, 313-344
Sun, 77, 109, 296
Surya, 61, 69
Syene, see Aswan
Syria, 8, 59, 119, 178

Table of Nations, 129, 130
Tablet, Divine, 115, 266. 344
Tablets of Destinies, 95-99
Tablets of Wisdom, 117
Tales of the Magicians, 150, 151.

177

Tammuz, see Dumuzi
Tanis, 32, 35, 36, 42
Taurus, Age of, 296
Taurus Mountains, 125, 290
Tefnut, 39, 150
Tell Ghassul, 185-190, 255
Tern, 38

Terah, 290, 291. 294, 296, 297,
304, 307, 318

Teshub, 4, 5, 70-74, 92-94
Thebes, 30, 309
Theogony, 49-58, 67
Theophilus of Antioch, 287, 289
The Stairway To Heaven, 122, 131,
136, 156, 244, 338
The Twelfth Planet, 109, 118, 192
This, see Tanis

Thoth, 27-30, 35, 36, 41-45, 59,
150, 151, 155, 167, 177, 184,
191, 216, 267, 268, 303
Thothmes (I, II, III), 5, 287, 288,
289

Tidhal, 281-283, 307
Tiglat-Pileser, 13, 74
Tigris River, 78, 123, 130, 174, 342
Tilmun, see Sinai Peninsula,
Titans, 51-58, 87, 91, 95
Tower of Babel, 197-199,202.
232, 246, 290

Transjordan, 185-191, 305, 307

Index

377

Tree of Life, 107
Troy (Trojans), 2-4,

Trumbull, H.C.. 305
Turin papyrus, 36
Tvashtri, 61. 67-69
Twelfth Planet, see Nibiru
Typhon. 33, 56-59, 72
Tyre, 15

Ugarit (Ugaritic), 314
Ullikummi, 93-95
Ulmash, 248, 259
Umma, 76. 249, 285
Umm-Shumar, Mount, 182
U S. Naval Observatory, 109
University of Pennsylvania, 222, 297
Upper Sea, see Mediterranean Sea
Ur, 12, 38, 76. 128. 196, 197, 199,
245, 248, 270-280, 286, 290,
291. 293, 295, 297, 298,
302-304, 317-321, 334, 335,
339-344

Uranus (deity), 50, 51, 86
Ur-Bau, 266

Ur-Nammu, 272-277, 291. 297,
304, 318
Ur-Nanshe, 263

Ur, Third Dynasty of, 270-274,
289, 290, 297. 298, 317-342
Uruk, see Erech
Urukagina, 265, 272
Utu, 81, 82, 93, 1 15, 125, 143,
145, 149, 154, 164, 219, 220,
235, 243, 244.

See also Shamash 249, 262, 274,
279. 306, 327
Utu-Hegal, 270

Vale of Siddint, 305
Varuna, 61 , 73
Vedas, 60-69, 237
Venus, 188, 241
Victoria Institute, 282
Virgo, 241
Vishnu, 61 , 65

Vritra, 67-69, 94. 95
Vyse. Howard, 136

War of the Kings, 281. 297,
303-309, 317
Water of Life. 23. 231
Way of the Sea, 185. 257, 288
Weapons, Divine, 11-14, 18. 19,
27, 30. 46, 53-69. 70, 93-95,
97-99. 102. 106. 159-171,
192, 221, 269. 276. 280. 309.
312-314, 318. 324-342
Westcar papyrus, 150. 151
Westerners (Western Semites), see
Amorites

Wheeler, Mortimer. 232
Whirlbirds (Whirlwind Birds), 97,
98, 123. 190

Wind, Evil, 313, 333-343
Wind, Lightning. 94
Winged Chariot, 58.

See also Aerial Chariots
Winged Disc, 25-30, 43. 46. 153,
155

Winged Measurer, 27-30
Xerxes, 20, 22

Yahweh, 6, 7, 17. 19. 20, 1 14,
156, 191, 197, 286, 291, 300,
302, 309, 312-315
Yared, 1 14

Zagros Mountains. I 1, 338

Zebi’im, 281, 305

Zeus, 2, 49-59, 69

Ziggurats, 75, 140-143, 270, 341

Zimmem, Heinrich, 224

Zion, Mount, 300

Ziusudra, 118, 119

Zo’an, see Tanis

Zo’ar, 281, 305, 313

Zodiac, 241

Zophim, Mount, 300

Zu, 95-101, 131, 140. 225

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